Mr. Show with Bob and David: The Definitive Guide
Thirty episodes, four seasons, a terrible time slot and a writers’ room that seeded twenty years of American comedy. How Bob Odenkirk and David Cross built the sketch show everyone else studied.
Mr. Show with Bob and David was a sketch-comedy series that Bob Odenkirk and David Cross made for HBO between 1995 and 1998: four seasons, 30 half-hours, seen live by almost nobody. It is also the sketch show that most American comedy writers of the next two decades learned from, the place where a generation of alt comics got their first television credits, and still one of the funniest things HBO has ever aired.
This guide covers what made the show different, who was in it and who wrote it, the sketches that are worth your time first, why it ended, and where to watch it in 2026. If you want the people behind it, we also have full profiles of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.
Where Mr. Show came from
Odenkirk and Cross met in the writers’ room of The Ben Stiller Show on Fox in the early 1990s. They came from different places. Odenkirk had trained in Chicago improv and spent several years writing for Saturday Night Live; Cross came out of Boston stand-up, where he was known for confrontational, politically barbed sets. What they shared was impatience with the way American sketch comedy was built.
After Ben Stiller ended, the two started staging live sketch shows in Los Angeles with a loose company of friends from the stand-up and improv scenes, part of the same early-1990s movement that produced the rooms covered in our history of alt comedy in the 1990s. Those live shows were the pitch. HBO originally ordered only two episodes; the team stretched the money to make four, and the first one aired on November 3, 1995.
How the show was different
Mid-1990s American sketch was mostly Saturday Night Live and shows shaped like it: a premise, a few escalations, a blackout, a commercial. Mr. Show broke that model in three ways that are still worth naming precisely.
1. Every sketch flows into the next
There are almost no blackouts on Mr. Show. A minor character from one sketch walks into the next; a TV playing in the background becomes the setting for what follows; a throwaway line turns out to be the title of the next scene. The idea, borrowed openly from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and pushed much further, was that a half-hour should play as a single piece rather than a stack of unrelated bits. Watching an episode feels like being led down a hallway where every door opens onto a slightly stranger room.
2. Theater and film in the same half-hour
Sketches on stage were performed for a live audience, and pre-taped segments (fake ads, mock documentaries, location scenes) were cut in between. The show used that contrast as a tool. A sketch might begin in front of the crowd, cut to a filmed commercial that one of its characters is watching, and come back to the stage with the commercial’s premise now driving the scene.
3. Satire with a point of view
Under the silliness, Mr. Show was angry about specific things: televangelists, talk-show outrage, corporate marketing, censorship, American self-regard. Cross’s political edge and Odenkirk’s eye for showbiz phoniness pushed the writing toward targets that network sketch tended to avoid. The jokes were rarely topical in a dated, headline-of-the-week way. They went after the formats and the people that never go away.
The cast
The on-screen company was small and stayed remarkably stable across four seasons:
- Bob Odenkirk, usually the confident, oily authority figure: the host, the executive, the man who is sure he’s right.
- David Cross, the agitator, the weirdo, the true believer, often the one whose logic the sketch follows off a cliff.
- John Ennis, a reliable heavyweight in authority and everyman roles.
- Tom Kenny, a character and voice specialist who was about to become the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Jill Talley, the most versatile performer in the ensemble and, like Kenny, later a major voice actor.
- Jay Johnston, a deadpan regular throughout the run who was also on the writing staff.
Around them came a deep bench of featured players and guests, many of whom became significant names: Brian Posehn, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Mary Lynn Rajskub (who introduced episodes in the first two seasons), Scott Aukerman, Scott Adsit, Karen Kilgariff, Jerry Minor, Brett Paesel and Jack Black, who played supporting roles in the first two seasons before Tenacious D got its own HBO series. Patton Oswalt turned up too, most memorably as a self-serious director in season two’s coupon episode.
The writers’ room that seeded a generation
The writing staff is where Mr. Show’s long reach really comes from. Alongside Odenkirk and Cross, the credited writers over the run included Dino Stamatopoulos, Brian Posehn, Scott Aukerman, B. J. Porter, Eric Hoffman, Jay Johnston, Bill Odenkirk, Paul F. Tompkins, Jerry Collins, Mike Upchurch and Mike Stoyanov.
Follow those names forward and you get a map of the next twenty years of alternative comedy:
- Scott Aukerman went on to create Comedy Bang! Bang! and co-found the Earwolf podcast network. Our Earwolf and Comedy Bang! Bang! history picks up that thread.
- Dino Stamatopoulos created the stop-motion series Moral Orel and later worked on Community.
- Paul F. Tompkins became a fixture of the LA alt scene at Largo and one of podcasting’s most prolific character performers.
- Brian Posehn built a long stand-up career and a recurring role on The Sarah Silverman Program.
- Bill Odenkirk became a long-serving writer on The Simpsons and Futurama.
- Bob Odenkirk himself became the producer who championed Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, which is how Tom Goes to the Mayor and Awesome Show got made.
The sketches to watch first
There are roughly 200 sketches across the run, and the show’s linked structure means many work best in context. These are reliable entry points. Descriptions are ours; the sketches are best experienced, not summarised.
Ronnie Dobbs
A petty criminal keeps getting arrested on a COPS-style reality show called Fuzz, and his televised arrests turn him into a folk hero. It is the show’s sharpest satire of what television does to the people it films, and its most consequential sketch: it spawned the film Run Ronnie Run, and a mock rock band in the same story gave Maynard James Keenan the name for his side project Puscifer.
Pre-Taped Call-In Show
Odenkirk hosts a call-in show that was, unfortunately, recorded in advance, so the callers are talking to a tape. The premise is one line long and the sketch keeps finding new ways to make it worse. Many fans name it the single most perfect thing the show did.
Coupon: The Trial / Coupon: The Movie
A pair of linked pieces that show the show’s favourite trick at full stretch: take an absurd, small premise and keep promoting it to bigger and more self-important formats until it collapses under its own pomposity. Patton Oswalt’s pompous auteur “Famous Mortimer” comes from this episode.
Grass Valley Greg
A tech-billionaire profile of a rambling eccentric whose fortune rests on inventing the delete key. A decade before tech-founder worship became a genre of its own, the show was already mocking it.
The Prenatal Pageant
A beauty pageant for the unborn, played completely straight. It is the template for a type of Mr. Show sketch: a real American institution pushed one notch past where it already is.
“How High the Mountain”
A send-up of overblown inspirational group songs, earnest enough that it earned the show an Emmy nomination for music and lyrics. It is a good example of how much craft went into parodies that only needed to be roughly right to get a laugh.
The cancellation and Run Ronnie Run
Mr. Show was never a ratings hit. It ran late at night and built its audience largely through word of mouth and tapes passed between comedy fans. Before season four, HBO moved it to a midnight slot on Monday, which made it even harder to find. The fourth season aired in late 1998, and the network didn’t order a fifth.
The team’s attempt to carry the show into film went badly. Run Ronnie Run, built around the season-one Ronnie Dobbs sketches, was shot around 2000 with Troy Miller directing. Odenkirk and Cross have both said publicly that they were kept at arm’s length from the edit. The film screened at Sundance in 2002 and went straight to DVD. It has its moments, mostly in the cameo-filled middle, but it is not where to start.
Afterlife: tours, DVDs and W/ Bob & David
The show’s reputation grew after it ended rather than fading. Several things kept it alive:
- The DVDs. The season sets released in the early 2000s, with commentary from the cast and writers, put the show in front of the people who had missed it on HBO. A lot of future comedy writers first saw it that way.
- Mr. Show Live. In 2002 Odenkirk, Cross and several regulars toured North America with a stage show billed as Hooray for America!!!
- The book. Hollywood Said No! (2013) collected rejected scripts and unused material, with an audiobook read by the cast.
- Odenkirk’s second career. His turn as Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul sent a new audience looking for his earlier work.
- The revival. Netflix released W/ Bob & David on November 13, 2015: four new half-hour episodes plus a making-of special, with much of the original company back. It’s looser and gentler than the original but clearly the same sensibility.
In May 2020 the cast reunited over Zoom for a charity livestream, which is about as fitting a format for a Mr. Show reunion as one could design.
Mr. Show’s influence
Claims that a show “influenced everything” are usually lazy. In this case there’s a paper trail. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have said Mr. Show was a major inspiration for Awesome Show, and Odenkirk produced it. The creators of Kroll Show, Key & Peele, Portlandia, Human Giant and The Whitest Kids U’ Know have all cited it. When Quinta Brunson won a Golden Globe for Abbott Elementary, she named it among her inspirations.
The influence runs along two lines. One is structure: the idea that sketches can be linked, nested and paid off across an episode, which you can see in everything from Awesome Show’s fake channel to the elaborate internal logic of I Think You Should Leave. The other is people: the writers and performers who went from Mr. Show to found podcast networks, run shows and staff writers’ rooms. Both are part of why it sits near the top of our 25 greatest sketch shows.
Its own ancestors are worth knowing too. Monty Python supplied the linking idea; Canada’s Kids in the Hall, a few years earlier, showed a North American troupe could make sketch on film that was strange, dark and personal.
Where to watch Mr. Show in 2026
As of 2026, all four seasons of Mr. Show with Bob and David stream on HBO Max in the US. W/ Bob & David is on Netflix. The DVD sets, which include commentaries, are out of print but easy to find used. Streaming rights move around, so check your local services.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I watch Mr. Show with Bob and David?
As of 2026 all four seasons stream on HBO Max in the US. The 2015 revival, W/ Bob & David, is on Netflix. The out-of-print DVD sets, with commentary tracks, are easy to find secondhand.
Was Mr. Show performed in front of a live audience?
Partly. The stage sketches and the links between them were performed in front of a studio audience, and pre-taped film segments (fake commercials, documentaries, location scenes) were played into the show, so a single episode moves between live theater and short film.
How many episodes of Mr. Show are there?
Thirty: four in season one, six in season two and ten each in seasons three and four. The whole run is about 15 hours.
Who was in the cast of Mr. Show?
Bob Odenkirk and David Cross led a core group of John Ennis, Tom Kenny, Jill Talley and Jay Johnston, with Brian Posehn, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Scott Aukerman, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jack Black and many others appearing as featured players.
Why was Mr. Show cancelled?
Ratings were always small, and before season four HBO moved the show to a late Monday-night slot, which made it even harder to find. HBO did not order a fifth season, and the show ended in December 1998.