The Ricky Gervais Show

Using the audio from the radio episodes and then supplying a sort of 1960s-style Hanna-Barbera wash of cheap animation to more fully illustrate the inanity of their conversations, Gervais has landed on something quite special that can be scorchingly funny.

Media Rights Capital, an independent production company, took an offbeat idea and made it work surprisingly well.

Given that the show largely consists of the animated Gervais and Merchant sitting around a table with the notoriously round-headed Pilkington, disabusing him of one oddball notion after another, it's strange that Gervais would've chosen this show to carry his name. But true believers--or fans of "The Life & Times of Tim," whose second-season premiere follows at 9:30--may well have a yabba-dabba-do time.

That a premise so slight yields as much amusement as it does is a tribute to Gervais and Merchant's quick wits and to Pilkington's blend of extreme gullibility and offbeat quirkiness....The purposely retro animation, which turns Gervais into a more cheerful Fred Flintstone, not only adds nothing to the mix--it subtracts.

Animation would seem to be an ideal vehicle for this, but there's only so much it can do--in part because there's no adhesive to the episodes. The three guys sit and bullshit for 20-some-odd minutes--at times entertainingly--until the program simply ends.

To reduce talents as large as Gervais and Merchant to caricatures seems absurd. The vitality and enthusiasm that passes between them, and the unfettered joy implicit in that, demands a human face, and without that, HBO is missing the point, creating a show that's easy to listen to, but actually hard to watch.

The static nature of three talking heads (even in cartoon form) is dull, and the intermittent non-studio interstitials used to illustrate the discussion fail to provide enough of a change. Watching cartoon characters laugh at one another feels recursively silly, and not in a good way.