Imagine the acerbic strangeness of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm combined with the parodies from the best of SNL, and you’ve got HBO’s wonderful little mock-reality comedy Flight of the Conchords. Each episode is a fictionalized snippet of the lives of folk duo Bret Mckenzie and Jemaine Clement as they struggle to get their band recognized and score with chicks.
What amazes me the most about Conchords is the quality of the music. Normally I hate musicals, but the songs in Conchords are insane — every number pokes fun at mainstream music while occasionally throwing a sly wink at the hardcore music fan. The pilot episode alone parodies everyone from Akon to Devo to Radiohead — for a bunch of folk singers, these guys have a tremendous musical vocabulary.
Best part? Each episode has a downloadable PDF of that episode’s lyrics.