Tosh.0

Each episode begins with a cold open of a viral video clip from the Internet. Presenting to a live studio audience seated before his virtual stage, Daniel Tosh makes jokes and commentary about that video, and about a selection of other viral videos and pictures. He may act as if he were commenting on a video-sharing site such as YouTube, making as many jokes as possible in 20 seconds.[20] The final video in this section enters a "Video Breakdown" segment, where Tosh discusses the video's elements of action and themes.

Tosh may perform original short sketches related to or parodying these videos. For example, he displayed a video of a man attempting to climb a precariously homemade staircase of milk crates to reach a flagpole, resulting in a great fall with visibly broken bones. Tosh whimsically parodied the tragedy in a fully animated stylistic recreation of Nintendo's original Super Mario Bros. (1985) video game, starring himself as Mario within the game's madcap action of jumping over huge blocks and collecting treasure.[7]

The "Web Redemption" or "CeWEBrity Profile" segments additionally invite the stars of those videos directly onto Tosh.0, where they are interviewed to explain and recreate the video's subject matter. The segment yields various blends of increased cuteness, humiliation, bullying, parody, black comedy, sympathy, or protectiveness in an attempt to explore and redeem the star and the subject matter.[3] For example, Tosh pretends to spend days trapped in an elevator with Nick White, whose actual 41 hours trapped in a New York elevator had been chronicled by The New Yorker[7] and posted on YouTube in 2008.[21] The "Web Reunion", "Web Remix", or "Web Investigation" segments are formatted similarly; the "Web Retreat" featured Tosh hiking with Paul Vasquez from the viral video Double Rainbow.[22]

Throughout the show, Tosh interacts directly with the live audience, inviting broadcast viewers to actively join his following of millions of Twitter users in "live tweeting" and to submit their own videos.[3][7][23] In the "Is it Racist?" segment, Tosh invites viewers to vote on any racial stereotypes presented in a video. In addition to garnering a reported average of 1,200 monthly death threats,[19] Tosh's ability to call the audience to action has yielded the mass vandalism of the show's own Wikipedia article,[24] and has resulted in traffic volumes that have temporarily crashed websites such as CelebrityNetWorth[25][26] and Comedy Central.[27]

Tosh routinely utilizes the show's screen time for promotion of his stand-up comedy tours, merchandise, and other TV shows—prompting Forbes to describe the show as being "as much marketing [vehicle] as ... [moneymaker]".[5]

Tosh.0 was originally renewed for four more seasons following its 12th season before Comedy Central and its parent company's announcement on August 20, 2020. ViacomCBS said in a statement that their intentions were to focus on the future of the network to be in animated and topical comedies, with Tosh.0 not fitting that format.[28]

As of January 1, 2022, MTV has purchased the licensing to the first 12 seasons of Tosh.0 and has been airing them weekly. In a 2020 press release, following news of the show's cancellation and before its acquisition by MTV, Daniel Tosh joked, "I look forward to doing an animated reboot of my show on MTV in 25 years".[29]

The first season was a surprise hit, averaging more than one million viewers per episode.[7][8] In June 2010, the season premiere was the number 1 show on its timeslot among men aged 18–24. With nearly two million viewers, the episode was the most-watched episode of the series.[1] This record was quickly broken by the July 7 episode, which had up to 2.4 million viewers, and the July 28 episode would attract 2.7 million viewers, again winning the time slot and being the most-watched show on television that day among men aged 18–24 and 25–34.[18] The July 28 episode was the top cable show that night for adults 18–49.[7][30] Within 10 weeks of its premiere, Tosh.0 became the second-most-watched cable network show in its time slot among males aged 18–34, a sought-after advertising demographic.[1][8][18]

In June 2015, Forbes ranked the show's Twitter following of 17 million members as number 43 out of 100 on "The Social 100", its list of the most followed celebrities on Twitter.[31] In 2016, a New York Times study of the 50 TV shows with the most Facebook Likes found that Tosh.0 was "very much of a Northern show, but not necessarily an urban one. It is most popular in Colorado; least so in Mississippi".[32]

The show's core premise has been initially compared to that of the perceived competition of E!'s Talk Soup (and its since-canceled derivative, G4's Web Soup), The Dish, Sports Soup,[33] and of time-filling viral video mashups on late-night talk shows.[3][4][5][18]

Hank Stuever of The Washington Post initially gave a mostly negative review of the June 4, 2009, debut episode of Tosh.0. He found Tosh's stage execution to yield a banal, juvenile, and unnecessary "blooper show" serving as a "cheap example of clearinghouse programming" which adds little to a mashup of viral videos but "clutter, buttressed by a lot of stale references". Stuever thought the concept of the series had potential, concluding that Tosh can "hold his own" within the concept of redeeming the Internet and "undoing the fail".[34] Five years later, Stuever re-evaluated the show positively as a now long-time fan, and addressed his retrospective regret of his "prematurely dismissive" impression by writing a new review to serve as "a long-delayed Valentine to [his] secret dirty love, Daniel Tosh", and described Tosh.0 as "a TV show about the Internet, literally and thematically", with a hilarious use of cruelty "as black as the online soul, and as fleeting and ephemeral", yielding a "blundering exploration of race, class, gender, life".[3]

Kenny Herzog of The A. V. Club praised the show's "high-wire act of being hysterically vicious and accurate in mocking oblivious exhibitionists without purely bullying" and that the show's "strongest moments of pure hilarity come from its extended, performed material". He describes the show as "continually playing Steal the Bacon for unexploited scraps against the absorbent blob that is viral culture".[33]