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Why the stars and creators of 2026’s big breakout comedy film think you shouldn’t watch their TV show
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol spoke exclusively to Radio Times about their instant cult hit Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
Vertigo Releasing
- Patrick Cremona
Published: Thursday, 2 July 2026 at 4:18 pm
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Back in December 2007, Canadian duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol released the first episode of their new webseries Nirvana the Band the Show – which saw the pair playing fictionalised versions of themselves as they desperately tried to land a gig at Toronto's prestigious Rivoli club.
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A cult following was built, eventually leading to a TV series in 2017, and now – almost another decade on – a film spin-off has arrived. Released across the Atlantic earlier in the year, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (the extra n was added for the TV show to avoid copyright infringement) has already been treated rapturously by both critics and cinemagoers and is well on its way to becoming one of the breakout comedy hits of the year.
Given it's a spin-off, you'd be forgiven for thinking that a certain degree of background knowledge was required in order to fully enjoy the film. At the very least, you might think it beneficial to watch an episode or two of the series first.
But speaking to Radio Times ahead of the UK release, Johnson (who also directed and co-wrote 2023 film Blackberry) says the opposite is true. In fact, he explains that if there's one thing he's learned from showing the film around other territories, it's that too much prior knowledge might actually be a bad thing for the audience.
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"You're better off going in literally knowing nothing," he explains during an exclusive interview. "The best way to see this movie is to have a very close friend tell you, 'You must see this movie,' and that's all you want to know."
He adds that he wants audiences to experience "the feeling of being like, 'What the f**k is this? This is stupid'" only to have their expectations blown wide open.
"[The film] transforming before your very eyes is a kind of magic that you will only experience once in your life," he continues. "That's not me trying to gas up the film, it's me trying to say you only get one shot to not know what's about to happen.
"And the number one review that I hear from people when they'll come up to me on the street and say that they love the film, they almost always universally say the same thing: 'I wish I could watch it again for the first time.' Because that really is special.
"It's like watching a magic trick performed, knowing absolutely nothing, and then as soon as it's over, you start to realise, 'Oh, I see how they did it, I understand how to get it. And so that virgin experience is erased."
Of course, Johnson isn't discouraging potential audience members from watching the TV show full stop, simply pointing out that the best way of doing things is to watch the film first.
"And then afterwards, there is a bounty of material for you to experience!" he adds.
Given Johnson's advice to go in knowing as little as possible, it's probably best we don't give away too much about the film's plot here. What we can divulge is that the film borrows from influences including Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and – even more overtly – Back to the Future to create a time-bending buddy comedy that is already well on its way to becoming a bonafide cult favourite.
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But this hadn't always been the plan – and Johnson admits he and McCarrol had already shot pretty large sections of a different movie that was more in keeping with how they had made the original TV show, writing it as they went along.
"We were about halfway through it, and we were like, 'This feels more like the television show,'" he recalls. "And it was Jay who said we should do a movie that's a gigantic parody of another huge blockbuster, so that the synthesis between what the movie is and what the movie is parodying is a lot closer."
He says that there was a great term for what they were looking to accomplish: "Ludonarrative harmony."
"Ludo is the Greek word for game, and [so it's] having a kind of connection between what our parody was and what the thing we were creating was, which was trying to be like a big pretend blockbuster movie.
"We tried to do that with the Talented Mr Ripley and Confederacy of Dunces – which is a book – which are both quite esoteric. It didn't feel like what we wanted it to feel like, which, as Jay said, was a gigantic, popcorn blockbuster movie."
But – as McCarroll explains – the decision to aim for blockbuster territory came with one or two challenges.
"We have never – except for a few little deviations in our series – done anything that's heightened or sci-fi," he says. "We've always kept it so that when Matt and Jay leave the apartment, they really are in the real world and it's grounded.
"And we found that we kind of lose some of the magic and some of that sort of man on the street stuff if we're going too high concept with a sci-fi thing. So it was a little bit of a leap for us go head first into like a fully sci-fi time travel thing.
"But we also found that front loading our Nirvanna the Band story with a lot of structured story – like a really good five act structure – helped us be the most Nirvanna the band we could be, because we could just really fire from the hip a lot more, get out there, shoot with a lot of people, try things a lot of different ways, and just let Bobby and Kurt, our editors, figure it out!"
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Vertigo Releasing
One of the other challenges – and something which is directly referenced within a meta scene in the film, when Matt turns to the camera and says "This is gonna be a copyright nightmare!" – was how much they could get away with overt nods to Back to the Future.
But according to Johnson, they actually played up just how much of an obstacle this was.
"We got very lucky in that early on we met the best lawyer in the world for fair use and copyright, a guy named Chris Perez," he says.
"He essentially joined our team and has been helping us make and release movies and television shows since, like, 2016. And so I make a big deal out of it in that scene, acting as though it'd be a copyright nightmare, when in truth, we knew we'd be able to get away with everything that we did."
There was only one aspect which did cause a bit of a problem — how much of Alan Silvestri's iconic Back to the Future music they were able to use.
"I always thought we'd be able to fair use the entire score," Johnson says. "And it was Perez who said you could fair use some of it. But how much is some? 30 minutes? 40 minutes? The answer was 30 seconds at a time!"
"No dude, it was three seconds," cuts in McCarrol. "And not only was it three seconds, it needed to be three seconds that was attached to a joke that was being told explicitly to parody it, so that you could marry them together and make a case for that. We couldn't even use three seconds unless it was tied to a direct joke!"
In the end, then, only two and a half seconds of that famous score is in there. But Johnson reckons this worked out for the best anyway.
"We made the decision to have Jay just do it all, because he's capable of that," he says. "So we basically turned a problem into a huge, huge, huge opportunity. In my opinion, the score that Jay did is better than what it would have been if we just used the real Silvestri!"
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie releases in UK cinemas on Friday 3 July.
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Authors
Patrick CremonaSenior Film Writer
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
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