The Ben Stiller Show

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

HIlarious DVD, Ben Stillers origins, 2008-12-12
This is a great although short lived show. You can see a bunch of Bens future characters on this show, like the "do it, do it" guy from starsky and hutch. Great bits: The dead head insurance salesman, Tony Bobbins, the anti-drug speaker. Great show.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

There's a reason it was 1 season, 2008-05-25
After 4 episodes I pulled the plug. Yes some funny situations but lots of "inside" jokes, repeated jokes, mumbled delivery. Stiller +company have definitely improved since then!

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Ben Stiller and Gang, 2008-03-03
Totally 90's. This show has some wonderful skits, most of which were Ben Stillers'. For fans of Ben Stiller, watch a young Stiller, a native New Yorker, son of brilliant comedic Hollywood parents, begin his career. Though confident and cool, there is an awkwardness visible in the little cut scenes in between skits, where we see a Ben Stiller begin to find himself ever so innocently as it seems. The Cops TV, Bono and Springsteen skits are the best. At thirteen episodes, the whole series could be watched in a spare day or two. I think its worth a watch at $9.99 used, for nostalgic reasons, for Stiller reasons, for some surprise guest appearances and for a laugh or two. This is also a document of the famous, in only recent months it seems, Judd Apatow. For people who love language, only French and Spanish subtitles.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Inspired, real comedy, 2007-10-26
Ben Stiller is, of course, the son of Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara. He no doubt had a leg or two up when the time came to break into show biz, so let's hear it for nepotism! Had Stiller simply been a kid from Kansas stepping off the bus in Hollywood, hitting that town cold, we might have been denied some of the best, most inspired comedy ever on television. The material in "The Ben Stiller Show" is as good as, and very often better, than any ever seen on "Saturday Night Live," "SCTV" or, for that matter, "Monty Python ..." br / br /This two-disc set, an HBO production, contains the thirteen episodes aired on the then fledgling FOX network from October 1992 to January 1993. An earlier version, under the same title, had aired briefly on MTV. br / br /Stiller was the star and point man. Maybe it could be argued that Bob Odenkirk, Janeane Garolfolo, John F. O'Donohue or Andy Dick could have taken the title lead - who knows how these things work? What can't be argued is all the cast benefited from brilliant concepts, with writing to match. And maybe Stiller was just a little braver than his fellow cast members. His range, from Bono to Oliver Stone, is impressive and sometimes astonishing. The viewer is left with the notion that Stiller never shied away from any insanity that had leaked from a writer's head. br / br /Far more often than not the skits, spoofs and bits are tight, well honed and well crafted. "Saturday Night Live" deserves leeway on those counts, since the show is performed live. Conversely, a taped show should take advantage of the editing and post-production tweaking available to it. Not all do. "The Ben Stiller Show" did. br / br /Here's a small sampling of what you'll see. How do you lampoon "Lassie," a show so lampoonable that it's easy to blow the parody? You play it straight down the middle - the farmhouse kitchen, farm mom and farm dad and Timmy getting into a scrape, all taped in black-and-white. Do all that authentically, but change one factor of the equation. Just one. Replace Lassie the dog with Charles Manson the psycopath. Oh but wait that can't work ... can it? Yes, it can. br / br /

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I want more than 13 episodes!, 2007-09-09
Truthfully, I wanted more than 13 episodes from this Emmy award winning show. The Ben Stiller Show featured Ben Stiller who was up and coming along with Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, and others. It was an only a thirty minutes show on television once a week. It would be shot in Los Angeles or Hollywood. He would bring on guest stars like Rob Morrow, Dick Van Patten, and others. The spoofs were hilarious and even better than Saturday Night Live. For example, he plays Bono with the guy who managed the Partridge Family. I love when he sings one in order to sell lucky charms cereal. I love the spoof of a Woody Allen film where Woody's character is a mummy, Mia Farrow's character is the bride of Frankenstein, and the plot is similar to the film, Crimes and Misdemeanors. The cast and crew of this show was first rate and this dvd version also has subtitles in French and Spanish. I loved the show going on location in Hollywood. This show really marked Ben Stiller's great talent and humor as well as his talent as a great satirist spoofing everybody from Tom Cruise to Bono to the kid from the Munsters. It was a great show and thank God, that the show is finally on DVD so we can preserve it for years to come.