Before Ben Stiller was a household name, he had the lowest-rated show on network TV and also the funniest. For some reason, The Ben Stiller Show never caught on, despite rave reviews, and FOX canned it after 12 episodes. The rest is sweet history, however: It later won an Emmy for writing, launched a handful of Hollywood careers and now, finally, is preserved forever on DVD.

On the surface, Stiller is just another sketch comedy show. But there was a youthful exuberance to the whole affair that, coupled with great performances and often-brilliant writing, made the show worthy of being mentioned today in the same breath as SCTV, The Kids in the Hall or the best of Saturday Night Live.

Stiller – also acting as a writer, director and producer – served as host, palling around town with that week’s random guest star (running the gamut of Garry Shandling to Bobcat Goldthwait) and introducing the filmed and taped bits that featured himself, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk and Andy Dick, all of whom were then unknowns. What a difference a decade makes.

Stiller got the gig partly because of a well-received The Color of Money parody that aired on SNL, so it seems fitting that the first episode kicked off with a movie lampoon, which imagined Eddie Munster assuming the Robert DeNiro role in Cape Fear. It’s hilarious, and over the dozen shows that followed, the crew would pull it off again with Die Hard 12: Die Hungry, A Few Good Scouts
and Woody Allen’s Bride of Frankenstein (and even for imaginary films like Stiller’s Andre Agassi in the action vehicle Advantage: Agassi).

The cast parodied TV with equal skill, often biting the hand that fed them. The reality show COPS was placed in ancient Egypt and medieval times, while their melding of several FOX teen shows – Melrose Heights 90210-2402 – resulted in a series high point, detailing a false rumor about a classmate being a cyborg (“Oh, someone made me lunch! Batteries? I am not a robot!”). My favorite bits were the occasional teasers for a nonexistent FOX show called Skank, your average stupid family sitcom, save for the patriarch being a dirty sock with a marked temper and laugh-track-ready catchphrase (“Shut your stinkin’ trap!”).

Other notable targets along the show’s inexplicably short life include U2, acting as breakfast-cereal shills; rap videos; Rescue 911; The Monkees, reimagined as grunge rockers; Wilford Brimley’s oatmeal ads; and obsessive Star Trek fans. As with any sketch program, not everything worked (Amish Studs or the Pig-Latin Lover, anyone?), but the cast was so often daring to be different (Odenkirk doing Charles Manson in a Lassie parody or Stiller doing Al Pacino auditioning for Beethoven, for instance) that the high points far outnumbered the occasional misstep.

Special note must be made of the ad for the children’s Satanic game “Kreepee Board.” With its scenes of demonic possession, virgin sacrifices and a pig’s head on a stick – all involving elementary school children – it has to be the most hysterically subversive thing that ever aired on network television. Except that it didn’t. It was part of the 13th episode that FOX never aired; it surfaced on Comedy Central a couple of years later, and luckily, it’s completely intact on DVD.

This two-disc set features entertaining commentary on select episodes, plus footage from the discarded pilots, several very good deleted scenes (particularly the wrestling spot with Dick doing an expert Charles Nelson Reilly), an E! behind-the-scenes special and scenes from Stiller’s earlier, also short-lived MTV show.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.