Andy Barker, PI: The Complete Series

Every once in a while, a show comes along which simply doesn’t fit with anything else being offered up by the network bringing it to television. Sometimes the network proceeds to nurture the show despite a lack of viewership; Fox kept the irreverent and exceptional Arrested Development on the air for three seasons, pleasing die-hards and critics but never managing to increase viewership. In the case of 2007’s Andy Barker, P.I., a spoof of hard-boiled detective fiction written by Conan O’Brien and Jonathan Groff even a modest five-week, six-episode run was too much for NBC to bear. The show wound up being cancelled after four episodes aired, barely a blip on the radar.

The show features a man named Andy Barker (played by Andy Richter) whose love of numbers inspires him to start his own firm as a certified public accountant. Incidentally, he takes over an office from a former private investigator (Harve Presnell) and is almost immediately misidentified as the P.I. Suddenly the mild-mannered accountant is getting involved in these crazy mystery plots. The important thing to bear in mind is that all of this is played for slapstick laughs, as each character in the show plays perfectly to type. Andy Barker’s character is naive to a fault, but seems to always manage to figure out what’s really going on behind the scenes, frequently falling back on his skills as an accountant in his search for clues.

It’s not hard to understand why America didn’t “get” the show. It’s got all the cheesiest moments of Dashiell Hammett’s best novels, but everything’s played up for laughs and to create excellent moments of slapstick hilarity. If you watch the show and you’re not prepared for the show’s sense of humor, or if you don’t know enough about the genre of film and literature being spoofed, many of the best jokes are going to fall flat.

That said, the casting of the show is about as perfect as you can get in the world of television. Andy Richter is perfect as Barker, who is at times clueless and brilliant. Harve Presnell, perhaps best remembered from his role in Fargo, is an over-the-top bigoted investigator living more than a few steps out of his time, but he’s able to play it perfectly, an almost pure opposite to Richter’s character. Tony Hale, as Simon, manager of the local video store and Andy’s “sidekick,” adds comic relief and frequent meta-references that play off how cliched many of the show’s plots have become in film and fiction.

The biggest problem with Andy Barker, P.I. is that there are only six episodes. The show wasn’t around long enough to make an impact on its audience, but that also cost us any character development, which is a shame. After watching these episodes in the space of just a couple hours, it became clear where the show could have gone, how much fertile ground there was for Conan O’Brien and his team of writers to turn over to create whole seasons of solid episodes. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be.

Thankfully we have Shout! Factory, and they’ve put all the episodes on two discs, with a handful of incidental bonus features, none of which is half as interesting as the show itself. But what a show it was, and if you didn’t happen to see it when it had its brief time in the sun, it’s well worth a purchase. If you’re a fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, situation comedy and slapstick humor, this isn’t a show you’re going to want to pass up.

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