The Beatles had been unexpectedly funny. They had a new look & a new sound, and they were (to boot) a new kind of charming personality act. So when Bob Rafelson & Bert Schneider went about casting their knock-off band for an NBC sitcom, they knew that the show's comedy would be just as important to the kids watching as the music.Art For Television's Sake is an obsessively researched and loving look at the care that went into conceiving and executing the comedy of the Monkees. It examines the comedians and the works that influenced the Monkees specific style of humor and reviews the evolution of that style throughout the tv series' first season.From the premise alone, the Monkees could have been the cheapest kind of ripoff, but Rafelson & Schneider were cool guys, true hipsters in a world of Hollywood phonies, who sincerely wanted their show to reflect an authentic youth culture and to be neither a watered down pander nor a cynical mockery. They hired a team of young writers (mostly from the world of satire and variety) and brought in directors who had no experience in traditional network sitcoms to give the show an identity that recalled the great comedy teams of the early 20th Century but who could also channel the art of Richard Lester into something wildly new and unseen on prime time TV.What ultimately strung it all together, though, were the Monkees themselves, excelling at their newly learned improv comedy and charming their intended audience as they winked their way through weekly madcap adventures.

As a musical act, they gave the 60s some of its brightest chart hits, as an experiment in network television they gave the decade a lesson in letting the creative lunatics run the asylum, but as a comedy troupe their greatest legacy is that the four exceptionally funny Monkees gave Baby Boomers a Marx Brothers all their own.