God bless Netflix for resurrecting treasure after deceased comedy treasure, but I’m honestly not sure how much more I can take. The scars of the strange fourth season of Arrested Development sit deep. Earlier this year I was totally exhausted just from wondering, at length and over several months, whether Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp would be any good. And then it was! But I’m spooked, still, by the possibility that a revival no one asked for can mess up something I love.

So, praise be, With Bob & David is great. Based on the two episodes made available for press, it neither eclipses Mr. Show with Bob and David nor lessens your appreciation for it. It's a whole different show, except that it kind of isn't, although of course it is, even though ultimately, it’s not.

Let’s back up for a sec. In 1998, HBO cancelled the little-seen Mr. Show after its fourth season. Since then, the show went cult, its sensibility informed an entire generation or two of comedians, and not a few of its writers and cast—Paul F. Tompkins, Scott Aukerman, Dino Stamatopoulos— achieved comedy-shaman status. Then, emboldened, I assume, by the Schumer-Key-Peele-Kroll-Armisen-Brownstein sketch-comedy-show bubble, Netflix invited Bob Odenkirk and David Cross to get the entire band back together.

In the years since Mr. Show’s unceremonious end, Cross and Odenkirk have both found fame in character acting, playing hapless losers on beloved ensemble shows (Arrested Development and Breaking Bad, respectively). But otherwise, their paths split. Odenkirk directed three movies and mentored younger comedians like Derek Waters and the Birthday Boys. Cross released three stand-up albums, each one a knot of focused outrage. His material on the Bush administration might be the sharpest and most cathartic record there is of what it felt like to be a liberal in 2003.

That tension, between Odenkirk’s bighearted silliness and Cross’s exasperation, was always there in Mr. Show, but 17 years of real life later, it’s really there in With Bob & David. Odenkirk appears throughout the first episode as Jonah Abramowitz, “the first elected, freelance Pope.” It’s an idiotic, delightful conceit, and Odenkirk plays it accordingly. But the premise is pure Cross, stupefied at why exactly the world even still acknowledges religion in 2015. The Jewish Pope blithely shills for a brand of kosher pork: that’s Cross. The Jewish Pope jubilantly flips off the camera while riding an A.T.V.: that’s Odenkirk.

The same tension runs through my favorite sketch in the series, which ridicules Australian techno-huckster David Shing. Played by Cross, “Shangy” is born of a clear, justified disgust for New Age–tech flimflam and the frauds who get rich from it. It nails its target, but the target’s also kind of soft. Then Odenkirk shows up as a mealymouthed imitation Shangy in blue clown shoes and a wig that keeps falling off. That was when I decided this was a good show.

With Bob & David retains Mr. Show’s Python-esque structure, where each sketch leads into the next. But it mostly ditches the studio-audience segments that started and ended each Mr. Show episode, and is overall a little less “live” than its predecessor. This time the team includes producers Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who got their start when Odenkirk produced their first show for Adult Swim, and Human Giant director Jason Woliner, still in high school when Mr. Show was on. All three are emissaries from the editing-room school of comedy that uses graphics and sound effects to play up what’s awkward or silly or grotesque about a scene. You can see their influence in the Tim-and-Eric-like title sequence, or when Shangy yelps and flies through the air like a tiny superhero. It’s both formally distinct from Mr. Show and consistent with the original’s spirit—something you could also say about the show in general.

Here’s the question, though: What is With Bob & David? Is it a new season of Mr. Show? Is it a “sequel” to the original series? A reboot? A completely stand-alone one-off? On one hand, Odenkirk and Cross have pretty much everyone back on the bus for this, they’ve kept half of the original show’s name, and if Mr. Show wasn’t one of the most notoriously bound-up-in-legal-rights shows ever, they might’ve used the other half too.

But Cross and Odenkirk have both said that With Bob & David isn’t a fifth Mr. Show season, or even a full season of anything (it’s just four 30-minute episodes); instead, we should see it as something self-contained, a fun project that they happened to find the time to do, and may do again if they feel like it. And I think that’s a model of TV I can get behind. Forget about seasons, episodes, continuity, format. Don’t bring back your old show. Just take Netflix’s money and do whatever you want, whenever you’re ready.