At the beginning of 2026, the world began to fall in love with Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, a film that seemed like it should’ve been as incomprehensible as its title. It was the movie spin-off of a TV show about a musical duo called Nirvanna The Band—a band that never really plays any music and has nothing to do with Nirvana, and whose eponymous blend of mockumentary and hidden-camera/man-on-the-street comedy aired for two seasons on the original, abandoned iteration of Vice TV and was therefore impossible to (legally) see anywhere for nearly 10 years. Also it was all about two guys—BlackBerry director Matt Johnson and musician Jay McCarrol, playing fictionalized versions of themselves—trying to come up with wacky schemes that would somehow help them land a gig at an otherwise unremarkable club in Toronto called The Rivoli, theoretically making it vaguely impenetrable for non-Torontonians.
And yet, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie became a surprise hit with critics and audiences alike—it has a frankly outrageous score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, thanks to a licensing deal that must be as absurd as everything else related to Johnson and McCarrol’s onscreen exploits (the series gleefully pushes against the limits of fair-use and parody law), film distributor Neon has managed to bring Nirvanna The Band The Show to Hulu and Disney+, where it’s now streaming alongside its movie spin-off.
And since reality itself has clearly become as absurd as using a bottle of Orbitz to travel back in time, let’s keep the absurdity going by ranking every episode of Nirvanna The Band The Show. To be clear: Every episode is good and has at least one brilliant comedic moment, so ranking them is a little like ranking your 16 hilarious children. Just consider this our whiteboard-scribbled shortcut to your own, personal niche-TV-comedy Rivoli.
16. “The Banned List 2”
The show’s final episode ends the original series on a bit of a downer, both because of its unresolved cliffhanger ending (though it’s not hard to predict that things don’t work out for the two guys who can never find a way to make things work out) and because it’s weirdly plot-heavy. The back half of the second season gets surprisingly serialized, which is still a funny concept, but something has to be at the bottom of the list.
15. “The Boy”
This is an episode that strains the “How did they do that?” nature of Nirvanna The Band (used to great effect throughout the movie) a little too much, with Jay and Matt befriending a sick child in hopes of convincing him to use his Make-A-Wish to get them a show at the Rivoli. The best moment comes near the end, when the kid collapses at an amusement park and they leave him alone on the ground outside of a hospital—the kind of thing you can’t imagine an amusement park or a hospital allowing them to film, but surely somebody had to sign off on this, right?
14. “The Buddy”
Built on a lovingly dumb Mrs. Doubtfire-inspired premise, this is another episode where the reality of Nirvanna The Band’s world (or lack thereof) is pushed just a little too far. It’s obviously funny that Jay would fall for a plot in which Matt disguises himself as a perfect new friend, and Matt running around to keep the lie going is a fun evolution of a classic sitcom setup, but it doesn’t reach for enough absurdity beyond that.
13. “The Booking”
The joy of this episode doesn’t start to come together until the final third or so, when a relatively straightforward plan to get a show at The Rivoli becomes dramatically convoluted (they call a local magazine from The Rivoli to get on a list of upcoming shows, but then have to call The Rivoli from the magazine after the band’s name is misspelled as “Nirvana”). If it seems low in the rankings, it’s only because there are sillier, more disastrous (and therefore more amusing) schemes to be found elsewhere in the series.
12. “The Book”
The only non-canonical episode, since it doesn’t open with a numbered chapter in the beginning (instead it has a great Simpsons “Treehouse Of Horror” parody), “The Book” is just pure, silly fun. There are both thrills and chills, plus an appearance from the big-game hunter from Jumanji (using repurposed footage from the movie), and it suggests that Johnson could pull off a pretty good horror-comedy at some point.
11. “The Banned”
“The Banned” aired in 2017, but it’s largely dedicated to Matrix-era hacker aesthetics (it’s a precursor to the great “they’re goths” moment from Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie) that were already outdated a decade before that. Under the impression that they’ve been banned from The Rivoli, Matt and Jay decide to hack into the venue’s computer system and change it. They even get help from a computer store employee who fits in with the duo a little too comfortably (begging the Borat-esque question of whether or not he’s a plant or just a perfect lucky find).
10. “The Boost”
If you don’t know Johnson and McCarrol from NTBTSTM, you might know them from the viral video (which predated NTBTS) where McCarrol sings lyrics to the iconic Wii Shop theme. This is the one episode of the show that also plays off of the pair’s love for video games, with Matt discovering that a local video game store is having a GoldenEye 007 speedrun tournament and misreading the grand prize as a show at The Rivoli. It starts as a love letter to retro gaming and ends as an anti-drug PSA. Or maybe a pro-drug PSA?
9. “The B-Day”
Johnson’s manic delivery of “It’s your B-Day?!” in this episode will ring in your head even longer than the Ben Folds Five chorus that plays over the end credits of most episodes, but it gets wilder from there. Come for Jay accidentally getting high at Toronto’s 4/20 celebration and Matt’s accidental descent into evil, stay for the oddly profound conversation that Jay has with a man next to a playground about when you stop counting your birthdays.
8. “The Bank”
The episode with the biggest scale of the series, it’s hard to imagine NTBTS could’ve afforded this without letting at least some of the people involved think they were witnessing a real hostage situation, “The Bank” opens with Matt and Jay going to a library in hopes of 3D-printing a gun, and it just gets more chaotic from there. They get swept up in a bank robbery that goes wrong, they negotiate with cops, and it all builds to a violent, deadly climax. It proves that, for all of his wacky gimmicks, Johnson is a legitimate filmmaker.
7. “The Buffet”
As twisty as the best heist movies, this is a My Dinner With Andre homage in which Jay tries to work up the nerve to tell Matt that he’s going to leave the band. It takes place at a Chinese restaurant on Canada Day, and a series of increasingly bizarre coincidences help remind Jay how much he values Matt’s friendship. It’s sweet, at least until the truth behind the coincidences is revealed—but even then it’s still sweet in its own way.
6. “The Band List”
“The Band List” opens with a great Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade parody, but it also features what could be the funniest moment in the whole series. No spoilers: It involves Matt and Jay needing to get something out of a museum and a random passerby suggesting that they use a phone, and the execution is so perfect and unexpected that every traditional, scripted comedy should be ashamed that they could never put together a setup so good.
5. “The Bean”
This episode would be higher up the list if not for one unfortunate word choice (which may have partially inspired the Hangover scene in the movie’s 2008 segment), but, that aside, it’s a gleeful, high-concept blast. Told almost entirely in flashbacks, Jay and Matt have decided to make a float for Toronto’s Christmas parade that will (somehow) get them a show at The Rivoli. There’s an extended Home Alone sequence that is great, but the episode’s real joy is the ending scene where Matt goes blind from watching the entire original Star Wars trilogy with his face right up against the TV.
4. “The Blindside”
A direct follow-up to “The Bean,” this episode is about Jay becoming insecure about not being “cool,” just as he and the still-blind Matt are supposed to go to an opening-night screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Jay takes Matt’s very accurate (and very cool) Han Solo costume for himself, and after they get kicked out of the screening for loudly talking, Jay tries to dump his insecurity onto Matt by telling him that his blindness isn’t cool. He proves Jay wrong with a protracted (and surprisingly violent/awesome) homage to Netflix’s Daredevil.
3. “The Banner”
The first episode of the series and the most succinct/elegant display of the classic “seemingly straightforward plan goes horribly awry” premise of Nirvanna The Band The Show. Matt and Jay figure that they can’t get a show at The Rivoli without a professional band photo that shows they’re a real band, so Jay puts on some extremely tight leather pants, Matt starts smoking so he can look more like Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, and they head to Sears for a photoshoot. They end up printing a giant banner of their photo that they can hang across the street from The Rivoli, and… the seemingly straightforward plan goes horribly awry.
2. “The Burger”
“The Burger” features the most thorough parody of the whole series, with the whole thing being structured like an episode of (of all things) the Wahlberg family reality show Wahlburgers. (It makes a little more sense when you consider that Wahlburgers was airing on Viceland’s sister channel A&E at the time.) It also has the most iconic ridiculous scheme of the show, with Matt believing that he and Jay can get on the kiss cam at a Toronto Maple Leafs game and spin the crowd’s disgust at seeing two men kiss into a promo for their band and (somehow) a show at the Rivoli. It doesn’t work out like that, of course, but Matt and Jay can at least fall back on the apparent magical properties of the food at Wahlburgers.
1. “The Big Time”
“The Big Time” largely breaks the format of the show by not really bothering with The Rivoli at all, but it’s in service of a plot filled with cute meta-gags about the “real” Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol. In the episode, Matt is making a movie about high school students and filming it guerilla-style by sneaking into a real high school, a nod to the real Matt Johnson’s The Dirties, which he partially filmed guerilla-style by sneaking into a real high school. He calls the movie Operation Avalanche, the name of another actual Matt Johnson movie, and sneaks it into the Sundance Film Festival (where the actual film did play, allowing the show to use real crowds and theater marquees).
Kevin Smith even shows up to offer Matt advice about making movies with your friend (he has a Jay of his own, after all), and his appearance is so genuine that it seems like he doesn’t even realize he’s talking to Matt from Nirvanna The Band and not the real Matt Johnson. The celebrity cameos are fun (you will never be happier to see Adrian Grenier), but the reason it’s the best episode is because of its abrupt ending: In the middle of a scene where they’re having a heated argument, both Johnson and McCarrol start laughing and break the fourth wall, telling their camera operator that the episode is over and that they’re going back to Toronto. It’s the ultimate encapsulation of why Nirvanna The Band The Show is so good, revealing that it’s not about the wacky schemes or clever parodies, it’s about these two idiots being best friends.
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