‘W/Bob and David’: Inside the ‘Mr. Show’ Duo’s New Sketch Series

It’s late April, and David Cross has just taken the stage in front of a small, cheering audience in a modest Echo Park studio. Standing beside him is Bob Odenkirk; he’s prepping the crowd for a taping of what the night’s host, Paul F. Tompkins, calls with faux-manic enthusiasm, “Sketch comedy! The best kind of comedy!!!” Before they launch into the evening’s skits — everything from a parody of reality cooking-show competitions to an increasingly odd twist on “The Most Dangerous Game” — Cross offers a disclaimer: “It’s rough around the edges. That’s what we do.”

On the surface, the set-up looks a lot like what these two men were doing, first in small L.A. clubs and then on HBO, two decades ago with Mr. Show, the hugely influential, under-the-radar sketch show that’s become the Velvet Underground of alternative comedy. Since then, Cross and Odenkirk have gone on to direct movies, star in TV shows (Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) and write books, teaming up for the occasional one-off event. But their new joint project — W/Bob and David, a four-episode-and-a-special series that Netflix will drop en toto on November 13th — is the closest thing they’ve done to actually resurrecting the series that helped make them comedy-nerdom icons. Watching the interwoven skits and seeing the duo trade lines with several of the old program’s players — Tompkins, John Ennis, Jay Johnston, Tom Kenny, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Brian Posehn — you’d have thought the Nineties never ended.

But fans may also notice a newfound looseness in the sketches and format, indicative of its creators’ current station in life, in which they can approach the show almost as a fun side project, as opposed to the make-or-break stakes these hungry young comics faced 20 years ago.

“I think that the differences are probably kind of subtle but structural,” Odenkirk, 53, says by phone from Albuquerque, where he’s shooting the next season of Better Call Saul. “We don’t link the sketches except when we feel like it; we don’t have as many rules [as before]. The format is less ‘traditional TV’ with the stage and theme song and a camera flying in.” He laughs. “It’s just, we start talking and then ideas start happening.”

“I would imagine Bob is going to be doing Saul for years, and I am going to have these other projects” Cross, 51, adds. (He’s joined the call from New York, having just finished shooting the latest season of his IFC sitcom The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret in London.) “[W/Bob and David] is a great thing to have in your downtime — to be able to cut loose and create this stuff, which is wildly different than the other stuff that we work on. You think, ‘I’m going to work hard on something else — but, 12 months from now, I’ll be back in that writers room with all these really funny guys making each other laugh, wearing stupid wigs and [doing] funny voices.’ It’s an important part of my life, and I’m glad I get to do it again.”