One of the Greatest Cult Shows of the 2010s Finally Arrives on Disney+

Matt Johnson has become one of the most interesting filmmakers working today because of the unique way he approaches storytelling, comedy, and narrative subversion. Johnson has steadily become a director who is willing to experiment within multiple genres, but his roots were in the short-form comedy projects that he created with his lifelong best friend, Jay McCarrol. Johnson and McCarrol developed humorously self-aware personas for their cult webseries Nirvana the Band the Show, which ran for a limited time on YouTube beginning in 2007; the characters of “Matt and Jay” might share the names with the real Johnson and McCarrol, respectively, but their personas are heightened for the sake of entertainment value. Johnson and McCarrol expanded Nirvanna the Band the Show into a two-season television series of the same name (with an added "N" in the band name) that began airing on Viceland in 2017. Although the show was kept alive by a small, yet devoted fanbase for over a decade, it is now available to stream on Disney+ for the first time.