It’s evening in East Village, New York. Below the ground, Chaka and Fruity tag along with Matt to explore the underground railroads and help him spray-paint a few trains by serving as lookouts. Passing through sewer water, strange sticky orange muck and a bunch of stairs, they stumble upon a room filled with a holy grail of tags from OG taggers. Meanwhile, above ground, Alex waits for his friend, Jen, to come home to her apartment all while her roommate, Leah, is getting ready for a date. Things start to heat up when Leah spontaneously invites a neighbor, who has been eyeing her from her window over, to hook up. As Chaka, Fruity and Matt have finally made their way to the trains, their adventure is cut short when they get found by railroad workers and run. The intense moment is shared when Leah’s date arrives at her apartment while she scrambles to hide her one-night stand and Alex watches everything go down.
If you’re a freak for grunge, alternative culture or adult animation, then “Downtown” is a must watch. The show aired on MTV in 1999 with only one season but has found new life among the internet’s ’90s nostalgia enthusiasts. Although it’s not available on any streaming services, all 13 episodes are on YouTube. Recently, it has made its comeback on TikTok with the #mtvdowntown reaching 9,000 posts. Fans on TikTok are reimagining the show by creating fan edits of the characters and using relatable dialogue as sounds for their own videos. Just like “Daria,” “The Real World,” and “Beavis and Butthead,” “Downtown” captures the essence of MTV’s ’90s television—blunt dialogue, overt references to sex and iconic outsider characters.
Chris Prynoski, the creator of “Downtown,” was working on the movie “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” as a sequence director, when he was approached by Eric Calderon, a development reader for MTV Animation, and offered a blind development deal for pitches. Prynoski looked for ideas in his sketchbooks and a student film he made about New York teenagers hanging out. According to an interview with Animation Obsessive, Prynoski’s pitch for “Downtown” had no concept but still got chosen by MTV. This was the decade when “Seinfeld,” another NYC-set show famous for being “a show about nothing,” was one of the top three shows in the country five years in a row. Prynoski recalls being inspired by films like “Slacker,” a film about young misfits living in Austin, Texas, and “Kids,” a film that shows New York kids navigating the dangers of sex, drugs and HIV. Wanting to capture the “true essence of New York,” Prynoski brought a video camera to the streets of the Lower East Side to interview people. The street interviews helped Prynoski create a pilot episode that later got greenlit. The voices and stories of the young people from the interviews morphed into dialogue and plotlines in “Downtown.”
The show follows the lives of a young group of friends, aged 17 to 26, getting by in New York. Alex is the nerdy older brother who collects action figures and has recently moved out of his parents’ place. Chaka, Alex’s younger sister, is a mild-to-wild girl who enjoys nightlife and occasionally crashes at Alex’s apartment; she is always with her bestie, Mecca, a hopeless romantic. Jen is Alex’s sarcastic friend from middle school who has stuck with him ever since. Goat, the oldest of the friend group, is a biker who loves weed and is always trying to get laid. Other characters in the show include Matt, the cool skater who enjoys tagging the walls of New York, and Fruity, the guy who flirts with any girl and has a lowkey crush on Chaka. Lastly, there is Serena. She is the goth girl baddie of Alex’s dreams who happens to work at the action figure store that Alex frequents.
Throughout the show, we see these characters communicate in a nonchalant and jaded manner—like most teens nowadays. Unlike other animated series, with overly dramatic dialogue and expressions, the dialogue between the characters of “Downtown” feels genuine, conversational, non-scripted and sometimes borderline TMI. We can see this in the first episode titled “Sin Bin,” when Goat visits Matt at his copy center job. He is describing his last hookup and how he pulled his “all-purpose seduction line” and got a hickey that looks like the “crab nebula.” Then, Chaka walks in begging Alex to photocopy a party invitation so she can crash it. She announces to Alex that Tuesdays are the “new Saturdays for anyone who’s remotely cool.”
The ’90s laid the groundwork for reality TV—shows that were unscripted, no filter, just raw. Shows like “The Real World,” which is essentially the precedent of “Big Brother,” document the relationships and problems that arise from a group of young adults living together. The show touched upon the decade defining issues of the ’90s like AIDS and abortion. It wasn’t until the 2000s when reality TV really took off. According to Britannica, “Survivor,” a show of contestants that are placed in a remote location and compete in challenges to win a monetary prize, the success of the show is credited to its shock-value. Its popularity grew in numbers reaching an average of 28 million views per episode.
Other pieces of media that covered hard-hitting topics at the time were films like “Welcome to The Dollhouse” a dark comedy film of a young girl that deals with abusive bullying from classmates or “Gummo” a gruesome experimental film about two teenage boys in Xenia, Ohio navigating the aftermath of a tornado that hit their town. The film displays scenes filled with violence, racism and poverty.
Meanwhile, ’90s MTV was the channel your edgy older sibling would put on after a long day at school—it was what the cool kids on the block would watch, a hub for all things grunge, chill, controversial and non-mainstream. MTV was going through changes during the decade of Madonna’s “Vogue.” MTV continued to play music videos of latest songs such as “U Can’t Touch This,” “Cradle of Love” and “Nothing Compares 2 U.” It also launched “The Real World,” and “Road Rules” which aired snappy takes on politics and culture on MTV News; and made outcasts the stars of animated shows like “Daria” and “Beavis and Butthead.”
Unfortunately, after the last episode was aired on Nov.8, 1999, MTV pulled the plug on “Downtown.” A year later, “Downtown” was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Animated Program. Prynoski told Animation Obsessive he’s still unsure why MTV decided to call it quits, but fans speculate that poor marketing decisions and inconvenient time slots for reruns pushed the show to its downfall.
But love for the show remains strong online. YouTube creator EnWaiSee uploaded a video in 2023 going in depth on the lore of the show. His first video covering “Downtown” reached over 150,000 views. On his channel, you can find interviews with the people who inspired or voiced characters such as Chaka, Mecca, Matt, Fruity and Serena. EnWaiSee even landed an interview with Prynoski. Users on IMDb applaud the show for its abstract imagery and realism. “This show feels more realistic of what it may have been like to live in ’90s New York City compared to contemporaries such as Friends,” one reviewer writes.
In celebration for MTV’s “Downtown” 25th anniversary, Prynoski’s animation studio, TitMouse, has launched a collection of “Downtown” merch. Fans can finally own a piece of the show! The collection consists of six shirts that can be found through their Instagram @titmouseinc or their website, titmouse.net.
So, if you want to feel what it was like to live in New York in the ’90s or follow the lives of characters you can actually relate to—look it up. You might see yourself and your friends reflected in the characters roaming around the streets, making the best out of your youth.
Taken from the Winter 2024 print issue of Inside Fullerton. Read it here.
