Mr. Show with Bob and David (series): Simply not funny and kind of sad

In this one I am going to disagree with the critics and reviewers who really rated this show and even nominated it for Emmys and other awards. I really wanted to like this show because I have good impressions of Bob Odenkirk and Davis Cross. This show premiered and was on the air a long time ago '95 to '98 but I only recently became aware of the existence of it because it was featured on Netflix.

Back in the late 90's Bob Odenkirk was not the household name that he is now and that is probably part of the reason why I had never heard of it. It was on HBO, which was a channel I didn't have at the time. If you were alive in that part of the 90's you probably know that streaming didn't really exist so there's another reason why I didn't know about it.

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I'll be up front and let everyone know that I only watched 2 episodes before turning it off and removing it from my list. At first glance I was thinking "oh wow, Bob did a comedy sketch show?" not realizing that it was more than 20 years old. I will say this though, I guess Odenkirk never looked young because he looks essentially the same in this show as he does now.

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David Cross on the other hand has always looked pretty strange and he was able to turn this into money for himself although he rarely appears as a star of anything. He does a bit of voice-over work here and there and does a lot of comedy writing and producing. I still appreciate him though.

This show may have been attempting to capture the magic that Saturday Night Live had really lost at that point in time but they were only going to have a permanent cast of two people. Each of the sketches are unrelated to one another and just like with SNL there were portions of the show where they would be addressing the audience. I don't think it was filmed live and that the skits, which were meant to be at least somewhat done in front of the studio audience almost certainly were edited to some degree. In many of the skits, you can see that both David and Bob are looking at cue cards rather than memorizing their lines. This was also quite common in SNL.

Unfortunately in the two episodes that I watched very little of it even made me smile, let alone laugh and the outrageous laughter that comes from the crowd and probably some sort of laugh-track starts to get a bit annoying after a while. I've always hated that aspect of comedies and was very happy when more modern comedies like Modern Family and Scrubs for example completely did away with them.

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These two must have had some friends in Hollywood though because again, much like SNL, they would have guests appear in their skits routinely including names as big as Jack Black. The rest of the guest stars were people who kind of remained B-List like Sarah Silverman.

Should I watch it?

I would say that you'll probably figure this out pretty quickly on your own. The show simply isn't very good and as celebrated a writer that David Cross is, I can't help but think that these episodes were not his finest work. I feel as though most shows should really capture the audience in the first episode or two before they taper off to mediocrity but this one just started out that way. I'm happy that Odenkirk went on to be a huge star because if this was the pinnacle of his success I would feel bad for the guy.

Watch an episode or two and see what you think. They aren't very long. For me I was dead bored after just 10 minutes of the first one and this should honestly never happen.