General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Very Mary-Kate

Very Mary-Kate is an American comedy web series created by and starring Elaine Carroll as a fictionalized, grown-up Mary-Kate Olsen, the former child star of Full House. The series ran from January 31, 2010 to April 25, 2013, produced four seasons and 82 episodes of roughly two to three minutes each, and was distributed through CollegeHumor.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	2- to 3-minute comic shorts about a super-rich, overly medicated Mary-Kate dealing with school, her sister, and her bodyguard²
Run	First aired January 31, 2010; last aired April 25, 2013; 4 seasons, 82 episodes³
Creator and star	Elaine Carroll, who also wrote the first season; directed by her husband, Sam Reich⁴
Origin	Grew out of an Olsen impression Carroll prepared for a 2008 Saturday Night Live audition⁵
Early traction	The first three episodes each drew more than a million views within a month of their 2010 launch⁴
Main cast	Luke Sholl as Bodyguard (43 episodes), Will Hines as Fat Professor (15 episodes)¹
Availability	Not currently available to stream, rent, or buy online⁶

Spoilers

Premise and characters

The series presents Mary-Kate as extraordinarily wealthy and detached from ordinary life. She attends NYU, where she intends to earn her "The Bachelor" degree while majoring in ponies; she owns a $10,000 hammock and a Vera Wang Snuggie; she eats no real food, asking her bodyguard for "a bagel, but not a real bagel, just a picture"; and she carries a purse full of prescription pills.⁴^•⁵ The character falls asleep at will, has a talking cat, and is never without a juice cleanse or a Trenta latte.⁵

Supporting cast. Luke Sholl, whom Carroll knew from college, plays her bodyguard, known simply as Bodyguard, and Will Hines, who directs Carroll's sketch group at UCB, plays her long-suffering NYU history professor, whom the character calls "Fat Professor."⁷^•⁴ Other celebrities appear as Carroll's impressions within the series: CollegeHumor's Amir Blumenfeld brings a Woody Allen impression to several episodes, and Josh Ruben plays Philip Seymour Hoffman.⁷ Season 3 also includes two "Very Maggie Smith" episodes parodying the Downton Abbey Dowager Countess.⁸

Origin

Carroll developed the Mary-Kate impression for auditions around 2008, performing it live and receiving a strong response before deciding to build a series around it.⁵^•² She chose Mary-Kate over her twin sister Ashley arbitrarily, and the Olsens' privacy gave her room to invent a fictional world with its own cast of characters.² Although the character is outlandish, Carroll researched the role, watching footage and interviews, older Full House episodes, and the Olsens' book Influence, and parodying what she called their caricaturish smile.²

Carroll had been making web comedy for years before the series, working with her comedy troupe Dutch West and with sites including CollegeHumor, Super Deluxe, and Bud.TV, and performing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. Very Mary-Kate was the first project in which she built a site and a world around her own character, and it became her most successful.²

Production and CollegeHumor

Carroll wrote the first ten episodes herself and released the first three simultaneously, expecting the project to be a small side project of about ten episodes.⁷ After the first season, Sam Reich pitched the series to his bosses at CollegeHumor, which commissioned a second season and hired Carroll as a producer, writer, and performer. Writing, directing, and producing the videos, each of which takes two to three hours to shoot with a five-person crew, became the couple's full-time job.⁴

The series was monetized through general advertising on CollegeHumor's site along with advertising allocated specifically to the series. CollegeHumor's chief executive Paul Greenberg said the episodes were among the most popular videos on the site, which reached more than 12 million monthly unique visitors, and that Very Mary-Kate had accumulated tens of millions of views.⁴

Reception

NewTeeVee wrote up the series after its first three episodes launched in 2010, and AOL's homepage picked up the story; within a month, those three episodes had more than a million views each.⁴ By May 2012 the character had almost 40,000 Twitter followers and the videos had reached 7 million views on YouTube alone, with fans submitting photos of her signature stance, hands flexed in front of the chest, eyes squinted, eyebrows raised.⁵ The series holds a 7.9/10 rating on IMDb from about 150 votes.¹

Will Hines, who has performed at UCB since 2000, said he was recognized more for Very Mary-Kate than for anything else he had done, usually by shy college-aged fans whispering "Are you Fat Professor?"⁴

The real Mary-Kate and the satire

Carroll describes the series as a kind of fan fiction, filling in the blanks of a celebrity whose private life is largely unknown. She acknowledged by 2012 that the impression was dated, since the real Mary-Kate had moved on from her NYU-era public image to running her fashion company with her sister, saying "Mary-Kate Olsen is not Very Mary Kate at all."⁵^•⁴ People who know the Olsens told Carroll and Reich that the real Mary-Kate was aware of the series, though her opinion of it was unknown to them; Carroll said she felt protective of the Olsens and drew boundaries, avoiding profanity in the scripts.⁴ Carroll's younger sister Elizabeth Olsen tweeted early in the run, "You so got her."⁷

Later run and availability

The series ran through a fourth season ending April 25, 2013, with season episode counts of 19, 27, 24, and 12.³^•⁹ As of the most recent listings, Very Mary-Kate is not available to stream, rent, or buy on any online service.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series › Premiered 1999 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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