It’s been 17 years since “Mr. Show” rode off into the TV
sunset, becoming almost legendary in an instant. The HBO sketch comedy program pushed
boundaries and made David Cross and Bob Odenkirk celebrities, at least in
certain circles, for their incredible wit and willingness to try different
kinds of comedy on TV. What they did with “Mr. Show” is the closest that
television has come to a show device called a “Harold” in improvised comedy. In
a Harold, sketches don’t just stand alone, they callback to each other thematically
or literally, and often exist within a specific structure of comedy. “Mr. Show”
was never that structured, but for viewers who had grown up on shows like “Saturday
Night Live,” in which one sketch never comments on or calls back to another, it
was daring stuff. And HBO’s license to offend gave Odenkirk and Cross the
freedom comedians often need to do brilliant work. For the nearly two decades
since, as the two have gone on to co-star in two of the most important shows of
the current era in TV (“Breaking Bad” & “Arrested Development”), we’ve held
out hope that “Mr. Show” would rise again. They did a tour and a really bad
movie (“Run Ronnie Run”), but it took until this week in late 2015 for “Mr.
Show” to rise again in the form of “With Bob and David,” a four-episode
mini-series to premiere on Netflix in its entirety this Friday.
From the two episodes I’ve seen, “With Bob and David”
definitely has a similar sense of humor to “Mr. Show” but a different tone. It
feels more like a casual affair, something that Odenkirk and Cross did on a
break from things they take more seriously. They are such brilliant writers and
comedians that their talents make the result of that “break project”
entertaining, but one wonders how this might have turned out with a bit more
concerted effort. It’s so loose and fast and strange that some will embrace the show for
it its sheer oddity—not to mention its willingness to offend, which could get
the pair in a bit of hot take trouble—but it’s a show that I worry will be a
little too inconsequential for the legend of Bob and David. Four mostly-funny
half-hour episodes are nice, but they’re nothing compared to what “Mr. Show”
means to a lot of sketch comedians.
About that offensiveness, it is interesting to me that
Odenkirk, Cross, and the people at Netflix are as unafraid as any sketch comedy
show I’ve seen in recent years when it comes to hot-button issues. In one
sketch, Cross, playing a man filming his own “Know Your Rights” video segment, tries to get a cop (played by the great Keegan Michael-Key) to abuse him at a
checkpoint, and keeps failing as the officer is just doing his job. The sketch
ends in a way that I won’t spoil but that some might find offensive. Some may
also be turned off by Mary Lynn Rajskub playing a deaf woman in another sketch,
even if she’s not the brunt of the joke (which is actually pretty hilarious as
a contestant on a cooking show realizes he doesn’t have the human interest
story of the hearing-impaired contestant or the one who lost his family in a
hurricane and so he starts making shit up.) Cross even plays a filmmaker who is
trying to revise slave history in one sketch, showing clips from his movie in
which the “Workers” (not slaves) are treated well and paid with hugs. I think
most people will recognize that Cross and Odenkirk are mocking offensive
behavior and not just engaging in it, but it’s still risky in today’s society.
And don’t get the wrong impression—“With Bob and David” isn’t all edgy,
hot-button issues. It is often at its best when it’s delightfully strange. No
other show could pull of a sketch that climaxes in Odenkirk becoming the pope
and riding an ATV, shouting “I can eat like a f**king idiot with no
repercussions!”
Will people even notice? With “Master of None” landing last
week and “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” next week, Netflix clearly wants to own your
November, and it kind of feels like “With Bob and David” is being dumped in
between their two biggest programs. Much was made about how poorly HBO treated “Mr.
Show,” never promoting it to the degree they should have. Maybe if “With Bob
and David” doesn’t feel like an event, that’s in keeping with the legacy of the
show that spawned it. People found “Mr. Show,” and people will find “With Bob
and David.” And people will laugh. In the end, legacies lived up to and the
disappointing length of this season doesn’t matter as much as that fact—people will
laugh.
