Watched the Mad pilot. It looked and felt just like the magazine. The magazine, of course, has not been funny since the Clinton Administration and peaked 30 years before that, but still, at least the show is recognizably Mad, unlike the last show to bear the name.
It had a couple of movie/TV parodies, a couple of chuckles, and entirely too many goddamn fart jokes. Presumably since it's prime time CN and not Adult Swim it can't quite get away with the type of content the magazine does, but still and all, there's a whole lot of shit you can do that doesn't involve, well, shit.
The best bits, as with the first season or two of Mad TV, were the animated bits of Prohias and Martin and Aragones cartoons. Spy vs. Spy is the one that translates the best to animation; the others didn't make the transition as smoothly -- I actually had to rewind the Martin one because the visual punchline went by too quick for me to catch it, and while it's absolutely beautiful to see an Aragones crowd scene on TV, you can't take it all in and examine all the little details like you can in print.
All in all, pretty thoroughly meh, but there's real potential there, and pilots are about potential, not about getting it right the first time.
And it's already surpassed Mad TV by sheer virtue of not peaking in its very first sketch.
