This faux sketch show has talking books, phone-ins about murdering baby animals, celebrity guests like Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd – and it’s so absurd it barely holds together as a concept. I sorely need you to start watching

British Netflix is notoriously threadbare compared with its American cousin. In the US, you can watch almost any film or TV show that has ever been made. In the UK, your choice basically consists of Aloha, that Bill Murray holiday special that temporarily made you despise Christmas and – because you watched Woody Allen’s Bananas – Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.



But things are getting better. Because this week, the gloriously silly Comedy Bang! Bang! finally debuted on Netflix UK, and it’s the greatest thing to happen to the service in years. Greater, even, than the awful third series of House of Cards that everyone forced themselves to sit through out of a misplaced sense of duty even though it caused actual physical pain to do so.

A spin-off of the titular podcast hosted by Scott Aukerman – a free-wheeling, largely improvised sprawl that can last anything up to two hours – the Comedy Bang! Bang! TV show is a different beast entirely. Ostensibly a late-night talk show spoof, the format merely acts as a loose framework for sketches and dizzyingly offbeat absurdism.

There are time travel episodes, episodes that consist of a single unbroken shot, deliberately stupid Great Gatsby rip-off episodes, and retrospectives of past episodes that don’t exist. There are dead-on reality show parodies that twirl off down unexpected hideous paths. There are phone-in competitions to determine which baby animal should be murdered and stuffed. There’s a talking book. There are misplaced sound effects and dead space at every turn. The whole thing is a jumble of oversaturated imagination, and none of it fits together in the slightest, and none of it is supposed to. It is the very definition of a hidden gem.

In each episode, the creepily perky Scott Aukerman will introduce a number of guests. One will be a recognisable celebrity – perhaps Amy Poehler, Brie Larson or Paul Rudd – and the other will be a grotesque character played by one of the podcast’s coterie of improvisational comedians. Sometimes Andy Daly will come on as a perverted theatrical director, or Kate McKinnon as a “professional downstairs neighbour”, or Paul F Tompkins as Andrew Lloyd Webber. It barely holds together as a concept, but that’s what makes it so compelling.

Co-host Reggie Watts – who has since left to be replaced by Kid Cudi, who has since left to be replaced by Weird Al Yankovic – has never been better than he was on Comedy Bang! Bang! He’s a fountain of noise and idiosyncratic reaction shots, and his presence perfectly underpins Aukerman’s weird sensibility. To see him struggle to find a place on James Corden’s talk show, where he’s increasingly sidelined in favour of GoPro footage of Corden cackling at Elton John in a Land Rover, is genuinely sad when you consider the heights he consistently hit on CBB.

Given Aukerman’s increasingly doomy mutterings about scheduling and ratings on the podcast, it’s not incomprehensible to assume that the show might be nearing its end. But that’s something we can worry about later. For now, we have 50 episodes to get through – and presumably another 60 once the fourth and fifth series reach Netflix – and that’s plenty.





I sorely need you to start watching Comedy Bang! Bang! because I’m obsessed with it, and I only know three other people who watch it, and two of those are strangers on Twitter. That’s a good enough reason to start, right?

