Series picks up where the ‘Mr. Show’ left off

Comedy has lately moved closer to the center of what we talk about when we talk about television — the anti-hero boom of the first decade and change of the 21st century, is now giving way to, or at least making room in the Public Conversation for, the likes of Amy Schumer, Key and Peele, Aziz Ansari and so on and so forth.

Leapfrogging that boom to land squarely in this new big bucket of laughs comes the reunited team of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, whose series “Mr. Show” was cut loose by HBO the year before “The Sopranos” arrived to cast its long shadow over the medium. “With Bob and David” is their new series, four episodes available via Netflix as of Friday.

It is technically — perhaps legally would be the better word — not a revival of the earlier show. But, notwithstanding some unavoidable changes in tone it mostly is.

Returning viewers will find the same mix of media parodies, phony commercials and surrealistic playlets solidly grounded in human behavior. As before, under the original influence of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” segments are tangentially linked — incidental material in one may resurface significantly in another — giving each episode the feeling of a journey.

There is the same love of slightly silly names: Amora Pendragon, Gibby Whangdoodle, Gilvin Daughtry. As a subscription service, Netflix, like HBO, allows the writers latitude in language — in one sketch profanity becomes a kind of superpower — and subject matter. Reality peeks in at times. Cross, paying a pizza boy: “Here, this is fake, take all of it.”

Cross is 51 now; Odenkirk, 53. But only a sketch mocking tech culture — Cross’ grandly mullet-haired “digital soothsayer” spouts Ted talky gibberish in an accent nicked off of Russell Brand — seems generationally old.

More often, they’re playing around with power and perception, as in a remake of “Roots,” called “Better Roots,” in which the white plantation owners are portrayed as aggressively kind (slavery, says Cross’ director, “has so many negative connotations, if you bother to look it up; we’re using the words helper and helping”).

The first sketch, whose punchline arrives only at the episode’s end, introduces the idea of death, with Paul F. Tompkins critically warned off red meat by doctor Jill Talley. “I ain’t joking, and this ain’t no show, mister,” she tells him, referentially.

In the second, Odenkirk and Cross emerge onstage from a time machine, which bears a likeness in more ways than one to a portable toilet, and in which they have been merely sitting for 16 years, to find Talley, Tompkins and fellow former castmates Jay Johnston, John Ennis and Brian Posehn. (Other “Mr. Show” veterans, including Scott Aukerman, Tom Kenny and Mary Lynn Rajskub are also on board, along with new friends such as Paget Brewster and Keegan-Michael Key.)