TVSquad

The DVD shelves have become a heaven of forgotten shows that barely saw the light of day.

Get ready to welcome one that got less sunlight than your goth cousin gets in a year.

The Late Night Insider blog, the underground blog of the former Late Night with Conan O'Brien, reported that O'Brien and former and returning sidekick Andy Richter are recording commentary tracks for a new Andy Barker P.I. DVD.

The show, produced and written by O'Brien and starring Richter in the title role, only lasted six episodes, but they were six episodes of crime solving hilarity that made murder funny again.

Barker is a CPA who moves into a strip mall, but gets bitten by the private eye bug when the atypical women in distress from every film noir ever made mistakes him for a previous tenant who worked as a PI. Barker needs the money and uses the awesome power of accounting to solve the crime.

The series had the feel of an early TV detective series as if the creators had grown up on shows like Columbo or Quincy, which wouldn't surprise me since it feels and works an awful lot like O'Brien's other detective comedy Lookwell. It's a great fish-out-of-water story where the fish learns to grow a strong pair of gills that work in both environments.

As a comedy, it's just as strong, thanks to some smartly written dialogue and brilliant casting decisions such as actor Tony Hale as Simon, Andy's video store manager neighbor whose film fandom and hatred of mainstream mush makes Randall Graves sound like Ben Lyons.

There doesn't seem to be an official release date, but you can bet it will hit the shelves around the time Conan's Tonight Show takes to the airwaves, unless Jay Leno has a TV pilot that NBC can overshadow it with instead.