Re-visiting Mr. Show With Bob and David

It's interesting what happens when an actor's career takes off past middle age. Sometimes the best thing that happens is the new audience re-examines that actor's past work and gives it its due. This is certainly the case with Bob Odenkirk after being on Breaking Bad, but more notably since the recent start of Better Call Saul. Even though Breaking Bad's audience was pretty far reaching, age-wise, it's fair to assume that a percentage of that audience had never heard of Mr. Show With Bob and David.

I was one of the Breaking Bad fans who had heard of Mr. Show and remembered watching it more than ten years ago, though vaguely at the time. Prior to Season 2 of Breaking Bad (when Odenkirk's Saul Goodman was first introduced), I'd wager that of the two stars of Mr. Show, more people had heard of David Cross than Bob Odenkirk. This is a real shame. Personally, I've never been a big David Cross fan and I wish I could say that re-visiting Mr. Show made me appreciate him more; it didn't, but it also didn't make me dislike him more. I land somewhere in the middle with him. Sometimes Cross leans too far into Woody Allen territory for my taste, but I get why people like him.

With the recent launch of the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, I decided to re-watch Mr. Show, just to remind myself what I had been missing. Now I didn't really set out to watch every episode of Mr. Show; there are four (well, three and a half) seasons of it and that takes some time. But I found that once I watched one episode, I couldn't help but watch another.

I don't know what I was struck more by: the show itself or the comments about the show on YouTube. By mid-way through Season 2 of Mr. Show, I'd lost track of how many comments there were to the effect of, "Wow, Bob Odenkirk is so funny! Wow, he's so talented! I never knew he was this good!" These comments surprised me mostly because I thought Odenkirk's comedic talents were obvious on Breaking Bad and certainly even four episodes into Better Call Saul. One look at the fake Saul Goodman ads could tell you that. Suffice to say, Mr. Show is damn funny and for a program that debuted twenty years ago, it's not even that dated. Even when certain sketches didn't work, Bob Odenkirk was so watchable that you don't even really care. When the sketches did work, it was pure comedic joy to watch. And while it's fairly obvious that Odenkirk was leading the charge, the rest of the cast did an equally wonderful job and it wouldn't be so funny without them. You see comedians like Jack Black, Sarah Silverman and Brian Posehn while they're just starting out and it's pretty amazing to witness.

Mr. Show works best when Odenkirk and Cross are playing it straight, particularly in a group setting. The combination of those two actors with Jay Johnston and Paul F. Tompkins pretty much guarantees some hilarity. Major chemistry between the actors is obvious and works for them even when specific scenes don't. The only time that Mr. Show truly suffers is when sketches go too long and you lose sense of the point of things, but that happens less often than not. It was a real blessing for Mr. Show to be on HBO where the creators were given the freedom to do as they pleased. I can only imagine what it would have looked like on network TV, but I doubt it would have made it on any major network to begin with, even today.

The only major quip that people could have with it is the amount of swearing, as that does add up at times; and yet I never felt like it was overkill and that it had purpose for most the sketches. Mr. Show wasn't about swearing and raunchiness though: it was purely about getting a laugh from pretty unexpected places. The sketches on religion and family life are particularly hilarious, and even when they dress up in absurd ways (the monk sketch is especially funny), usually a laugh is found somewhere. Not once during any of the 30 episodes did I think, "This really isn't funny", it was more like, "This is funny, but..." It had a sprinkling of SNL (Odenkirk used to write for SNL, after all) and a dash of MAD TV, but mostly it was pretty original stuff. It may not have had the influence of, say, Kids In The Hall, but it was a quality show all the same. And if there is a comedian more watchable than Bob Odenkirk, I haven't found him.

I suppose that's part of what makes his performances on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul all the more impressive, as it marked his first stab at drama on a TV series. Vince Gilligan, creator of both those shows, was apparently a fan of Mr. Show and gave the role of Saul Goodman to Odenkirk without so much as an audition, and it's easy to see why.

I don't necessarily recommend going the route that I did with Mr. Show, as watching all 30 episodes is certainly not required; but you can find basically all the best sketches from the show on YouTube. My top 5 sketches are "Marriage Announcement", "Weeklong Romance", "Lie Detector Test", "Botched Drug Deal" and "Intervention." But that's just the beginning of my favorites list because there were many great sketches on this show. Mr. Show is not for everyone, but for the rest of us, there is so much to enjoy and appreciate. I count it as one of my favorite sketch shows ever.