Though any description is
bound to come off as reductive, Awesome Show is largely an extended riff on the half-assed
surrealism and excruciating awfulness of public access television, that
unwatched wasteland of cheap stylistic tricks, amateur performers, and
incompetence pushed to comic/horrifying extremes. Heidecker and Wareheim play
many of the characters themselves, often hidden under layers of ugly make-up
and thrift shop outfits, but ringers from both the comedy world (Zach
Galifianakis, David Cross, Paul Reubens) and the realm of genuine, unironic
public-access weirdness (ventriloquist David Liebe Hart) join them throughout.
The trippy, free-associative
humor of Awesome is surreal,
Dadaistic, gleefully absurd, and many other pretentious adjectives critics use
to indicate that a comedy is into some seriously weird, fucked-up shit. Over
the course of the first season's ten episodes, the show moves steadily from
funny-ha-ha to funny-strange, but just when it seems to be sinking into fatal
self-indulgence, Heidecker and Wareheim double back into the land of funny.
Though it isn't always apparent, there is a method to the duo's madness, even
if that means structuring an entire show around the little-known profession of
gravy robbery and people turning into cats. Thanks largely to the participation
of Bob Odenkirk as creative consultant and a regular performer—most
notably in a series of fake commercials for bizarre products like B'owl (a
bat/owl monstrosity) and B'ougar (a creature with the body of a bear and the
nightmare-inducing cry of a cougar), Awesome feels like Mr. Show 2.0. The comedy hasn't evolved, necessarily, but it has
gotten a whole lot stranger.
Key features: The usual grab bag of special features, including
commentaries on every episode and intermittently funny deleted scenes.
