There’s a part in Bob Odenkirk’s book where, after having a run of success with Mr. Show and several interrelated ventures, they decide to make a sketch movie and the whole project flops.
Failure is a part of the process, no matter who you are. Reminders like this are the only antidotes I know to the modern experience of self-helpy success stories and non-stop reminders of how much better somebody else is doing than you.
There’s a balance here I so deeply feel. Where on one hand you need to stay humble, and on the other, you need to have supreme confidence in the scene you’re in and part of, without feeling like you have to make your scene the biggest in the world.
The quote, as I transcribed it from the audio book version of Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, goes like this:
Look, I'm not a total idiot - I'm an incomplete one. Still, I was easily conscripted into a new approach, something that would complicate our initial plan to simply make a sketch movie and doomed the entire enterprise. And if there's one lesson Star Trek has taught us all, it's simply this: never doom the Enterprise.
We should have just done what we did when we made our little TV show, which was try to please an audience of two. Me and David. And everybody else in the world could follow along, or go hang.
I like remembering that yes, I’m part idiot, but also part non-idiot, and you need a crack for some light to get in.
What I loved most about this book is the lesson revealed by the project’s failure, which was the best work him and David Cross ever did was the work that lived up to their own internal standards, and nothing else.
That’s what got them their show, that’s what earned them their audience, and that’s the only thing they were uniquely qualified to deem as worthy of their time and attention.
You get a little success and you try to scale things up and - this is what happens. If Odenkirk needs a reminder, I know I definitely need the reminder.
If you have a scene, remember what makes the scene special is its inability to scale.
Yes, others can check it out, or come visit, or evangelize it at scale, but you can never make the specialness of the scene scale like it’s some type of hyper-growth startup without losing the essence at its core.
What made Mr. Show great was the humility behind that realization - that the work for audience of two made anybody who watched it want to see more, because surely these two were making each other crack up.
ps. This is directly related to the question: It is a startup or a scene?
