If you happen to love Ricky Gervais, you'll no doubt eat up his latest project, "The Ricky Gervais Show," a new animated series premiering tonight on HBO. The show is built around a string of popular podcasts featuring Gervais, his longtime collaborator Stephen Merchant, and their dim friend Karl Pilkington.
In the show-slash-podcasts, the three men sit around and have random, pointless debates about topics such as the necessity of modern inventions and monkeys in space. That may sound boring, but Pilkington is so genuinely and earnestly ridiculous, and Gervais and Merchant are so brilliant at making fun of his absurdity, that the show is quite funny from start to finish.
Gervais and Merchant never hold back when evaluating Pilkington's notions. At one point in the first episode, as Gervais and Merchant take turns heaping scorn on one of Pilkington's psychotic ramblings (in between their own howls of laughter), Gervais tells him, "I saw a similar sort of theory written out on a wall, but it was written in sh*t."
Pilkington comes across as actually pretty stupid and also unfazed by their ridicule, always sticking stubbornly to his points. His idiocy doesn't appear to be an act, and the result is hilarious.
I honestly don't know if animating the podcasts adds that much to the humor, since just listening is pretty danged funny. But animation does get them off the internet and onto HBO, so there's that.
You can watch the first episode for free right now on iTunes, and the series premieres tonight at 9pm on HBO.
Brooke Cain isn't always proud of the number of hours she logs in front of the TV, but her loss of brain cells can be your gain. From reality shows to sitcoms to the more serious stuff, Brooke keeps her DVR smoking so that she can help keep you in the know. Brooke also tweets for Happiness is a Warm TV (you can follow 
