From the moment it premiered last August, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace was causing disturbances in the insular and relatively supportive weirdo-comedy world of Adult Swim. The show, with its odd pacing, jarring graphics and bizarre characters and scenarios, at first glance contains all the hallmarks of other offerings from the Cartoon Network offshoot — cult sketch shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! and The Eric Andre Show. Watch long enough, however, and World Peace veers into some shocking and arguably offensive territory. In one sketch, a man trips his brother's wife because he doesn't find her attractive enough, sending her face-first into a glass coffee table. In another, an African-American woman boasts of getting $40,000 a year in disability payments. Even a seemingly innocuous sketch about "making tap water" takes an ugly turn when the actor in it angrily references men "taking it in the ass," for no apparent reason.
The show is from the mind of a trio of Rhode Island-based sketch comedians — Sam Hyde, Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll — who've been at it for a decade and call themselves Million Dollar Extreme (MDE). Prior to series pickup last May, they already had amassed a sizable following, particularly in the "alt-right" online community that has championed white supremacy and cheered Donald Trump's rise to power. As the group's leader, the 31-year-old Hyde — who tweets support for alt-right theories like Pizzagate while hurling attacks at left-leaning celebrities like Lena Dunham (whom he called a "fat pig") and Patton Oswalt (whom he theorized had "killed his wife") — has drawn the majority of heat.
