TVSquad

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

• CSI - Season 1 (Widescreen/Blu-ray)
• Curious George - Curious George Goes Green
• The Dana Carvey Show - Complete Series
• The Jeff Foxworthy Show - Season 2

(S01E7) Originally aired on April 30, 1996.

It's easy to forget just how funny this show was. It's not just that it had a bunch of funny material and a talented cast (including Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Robert Smigel), it's that the batting average for each show was damn good. There's more funny stuff in each 30 minutes of a Dana Carvey Show episode than in 90 minutes of Saturday Night Live or even SCTV. No dead moments to sit through. I'm not sure why this show was so short-lived (other than the fact that the first episode featured Carvey as President Clinton, suckling a bunch of cats on his teats). And ratings, ratings, blah, blah, blah.

It was actually kinda hard to pick a standout episode since so many episodes have a lot of great stuff. But I think the video after the jump has some classic moments.

They really should release this show on DVD. As Adam noted before, it really is quite amazing how clever and ahead of its time it was, and equally amazing the caliber of talent that worked on the show in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

After the jump are several videos of Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert on The Dana Carvey Show. They've gone their separate ways, but if you include their work here and on The Daily Show and as Ace and Gary on Saturday Night Live, they could have been the next great comedy team. And then they would have gotten sick of each other and broken up and not spoken for 20 years and then reunited by Jon Stewart on a telethon.

I think The Onion had it right: The Dana Carvey Show, which was canceled in 1996 after a whopping six episodes, was ahead of its time and too surreal for folks used to Saturday Night Live, but it also offered, for many, a first glance at writers and actors who eventually helped define today's reigning style of comedy: Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Louis C.K., Dino Stamatopoulos, Dave Chappelle and Charlie Kaufman.

I've been yelling at myself a lot lately for never watching The Dana Carvey Show when it aired back in 1996. Seriously, I sit alone in my apartment screaming at myself. Sometimes I even throw myself down the stairs. My apartment doesn't actually have stairs so I fling myself from my couch several times. I do this because every time I find a clip of that show I can't believe how hysterical it is. What in the world was I doing back then? I was in college for crying out loud, I had all the time in the world to watch TV. It's not like I was studying.

If you click here, you can watch a clip from The Dana Carvey Show called "Skinheads from Maine" featuring Dana himself and Stephen Colbert. I think it proves that the show had a little something for everyone, even racist New Englanders.

Before we knew him as a correspondent on The Daily Show, Mr. Noblet on Strangers with Candy, and later the star of his own faux news analyst program, The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert was just another sketch player on shows like Exit 57 and the Dana Carvey Show. Colbert starred on the short-lived Exit 57 with Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, who would later re-team with him for Strangers with Candy. After the jump, see a younger Colbert and his future Daily Show co-worker Steve Carell playing waiters made sick by the mere mention of food on the Dany Carvey Show, and then watch a clip from Exit 57 with Colbert, Dinello and Sedaris that I can't really describe, except to say you get to see Colbert and Dinello makeout with one another. Mmmm, that's tasty.

Check out the vids after the jump.