"Primetime Glick" has got to be one of the stranger spin-off ideas in television history: a character rescued from the short-lived "Martin Short Show" gets a late-night-style interview show on Comedy Central and makes it big. In it, Martin Short plays the title character, an overweight, hyperactive, half-fawning, half-obtuse interviewer that sits down with one or two of Hollywood's biggest comedic talents every week for interviews that are played as real - as long as the interviewees can keep from laughing.
In this collection, we get five episodes from the first season (2001) of "Primetime Glick" which actually amounts to half the season. Why they couldn't just give us the first five episodes of the season instead is beyond me - maybe they're using the release to gauge consumer interest. Anyway, along with four really funny episodes featuring Bill Maher, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Jerry Seinfeld, Janeane Garofalo, basketball star John Salley, Conan O'Brien, Eugene Levy - and a surprisingly bad episode featuring Kathy Lee Gifford and Darrell Hammond doing his "SNL" Dick Cheney - the disc also includes added material from the Seinfeld, Martin, Gifford, O'Brien and Garofalo interviews (in some cases longer and funnier than the stuff that was put in the episode) and a few other goodies from Comedy Central - a "Glick" segment featuring Julia-Louis Dreyfus, a "South Park" segment and a "Crank Yankers" segment.
In all, this show has been a pleasant surprise treat for me, and I was pleased at how good the DVD was given the rather low price. I hope that Comedy Central will get around to releasing full seasons at some point, but until they do, this is a surprisingly good "Best of" collection.