Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama by Bob Odenkirk

Author:Bob Odenkirk [Odenkirk, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Over Uneasy

Two weeks before our fourth season premiere, an HBO exec called us and said, “Hey, this is not bad news, guys, it’s…not.” Of course, this was bad news. “It’s interesting, let’s just say…Anyway, we are going to switch your time slot. You guys are going to be on Mondays at midnight now.”

“But we’ve always been on Fridays—who watches TV on Monday at midnight?” asked either David or I.

“I know, I know. Well, every night of the week we will have something special at midnight! You guys are getting Monday. To kick off the week.”

“But Monday is a bad, bad day. It’s a mistake—nobody even wants to have Monday day, much less Monday night,” said David and I, in unison.

“Yeah…I know, but Monday has to happen whether people like it or not. So you are officially being buried there—I mean, uh, killed, not buried…Did I say ‘killed’? I meant disappeared. We are officially disappearing your show on Mondays at midnight. G’bye.”

I looked over at David and saw him getting fitted for a plane ticket. He looked at me and saw a giant carp wearing human clothes, sucking air. The fourth season, our best from top to bottom, was two weeks from airing, but right then we knew we were finished. My son, Nate, was born a week after we taped the final show, so I was on the verge of my greatest role—“Anxious Dad”—and David heard New York might be lucky enough to get a Trump hotel with a Trump toilet in it that he could shit in for the rest of his life, so it certainly felt like a moment.

I remember sitting at my desk, looking across the office at him, and wondering, How hard should we fight for more? We could have, but also, we’d done it. Planted our flag. Did we really need to wait around for everyone to salute it? In truth, I was just trying to show that it could be done, and in my mind (and I think David felt the same), there it was, take it or leave it. We did our part. I knew that over time, the work we’d done would still be funny and people would see it, or not. What I didn’t know was how prescient our outlandish notions were. “The Mr. Show Water Cooler” is Fox News, with sweaty propaganda passed off as homey reg’lar folk shit-shootin’. The soccer team Real Madrid actually did recruit a seven-year-old (see “The Recruiters,” episode 205), and the notion behind “America Blows Up the Moon” (episode 306), well, that was something NASA actually looked into doing, for some reason. Oh, and “Rap! The Musical”—come on, we should get a cut of Hamilton!

In the end, the show’s biggest contribution to the general culture was to provoke and prod other, younger screwballz (pronounced like “screwballs”) like us.

Tim Heidecker: “We knew this guy in Philly named Cotton Candy, who is a real guy. He was our age, a little older, and what Cotton Candy would do for a living is bootleg tapes.

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