Release Date: June 10, 2008
The Basics:
Comedy Central's Home Grown is a sort of smorgasbord of Comedy Central programming, featuring full episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program, TV Funhouse, Strangers With Candy, Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil and Reno 911!, plus clips from Chappelle’s Show, Drawn Together, Crank Yankers, Viva Variety and The Sarah Silverman Program (in addition to the full episode), along with an arbitrary assortment of bonus features. It’s all "cleverly" designed to appeal to the lucrative stoner demographic, with pot-referencing menu headers and a good deal of content that uses marijuana as part of its subject matter.
Bonus Features:
- A full episode of the calming PBS how-to-paint series The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross
- Spiders on Drugs, a short faux-educational film
- Weed, an actual educational short film about marijuana
- Three animated short films from Mike Judge’s compilation The Animation Show
- Comedy Central promos
Review:
There’s a lot of funny stuff on Comedy Central, which may be why offering a sampler of it seemed like a good idea. But if you’re a fan of any of the shows featured here (with the exception of Viva Variety), you can already get full DVD sets rather than just single episodes or short clips. The vague pot theme doesn’t tie the content together in any meaningful way, and comes off mostly as pandering to what Comedy Central thinks is its core audience.
It’s great to see even a few minutes of the underrated Viva Variety, though, which ran for two seasons in the late ’90s. The variety-show parody from three members of the comedy troupe The State (whose short-lived MTV show is a cult classic) is overdue for a DVD release of its own, especially since stars Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver have gone on to great success for Comedy Central with Reno 911!
Most of the shows on this disc aren’t bad per se (although, let’s be honest, Drawn Together is terrible); they’re just packaged without much care. And whoever in Comedy Central’s home-video department thought that anyone would want to watch a full half-hour of frizzy-haired painting instructor Bob Ross’ tutorials on "happy little trees" must really have been smoking something.
The Bottom Line:
You could get the same effect from just watching any three random hours of Comedy Central, without even leaving your couch.
