If you follow how TV sitcoms work, you'll start to see a pattern, one that involves giving comedians their own vehicles and hoping they'll explode into hits. From Seinfeld to Roseanne, the '90s were full of stand-up comedian-starring situation comedies all over the Big Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC). One of those was Home Improvement, which ran for eight seasons throughout the entire decade (1991-1999). Its fourth season, though, spawned something that many might have missed, and if it had been successful would have changed the landscape of sketch comedy shows forever.
We're talking about a season four (so, 1995) episode of Home Improvement entitled "Talk to Me" that featured future Half Baked stars Dave Chappelle and Jim Breuer. As you can see in the clip up above, Chappelle and Breuer played, um, Dave and Jim, and got some relationship help from Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor that, as per usual, went very LEFT. It's not on the level of Chappelle's Show, but it's not supposed to be—this was a family-friendly show, which again is probably weird AF for heads who didn't know of Chappelle outside of being Rick James or Clayton Bigsby.
Things escalated from there: apparently, ABC (the home of Home Improvement) was so enamored with Chappelle (and, to some extent, Breuer) that they developed a sitcom for them entitled Buddies. About a year after their Home Improvement appearance, Buddies—which perfectly adapted their characters from Home Improvement—debuted on ABC. First huge problem: there was no Jim Breuer. As the story goes, ABC didn't feel Breuer during the rehearsal process, and replaced him with Christopher Gartin, therefore totally banishing the natural chemistry between Breuer and Chappelle.
Guess what happened next? If you said "ABC canceled the series after only one month and five episodes," you win a bucket of Ribs. How ABC thought that veering away from the vibrant chemistry of two very weird dudes wouldn't end up destroying the entire program that had you so jazzed in the first place, I do not know. Way to go, Hollywood!
What's even weirder is that Buddies seemed to suffer the same kind of fate that that E.T. Atari game did: it was so bad that it was practically erased from existence. Buddies was released on DVD in 2005, and reportedly only featured 10 of the 13 episodes that were created (although all eight of the unaired episodes were included). It was a Best Buy exclusive that isn't available from them anymore, though you CAN cop it on eBay (along with all kinds of press photos, because who doesn't want Dave Chappelle memorabilia from the mid-'90s).
OR you can just celebrate Chappelle's belated birthday and watch all of the Chappelle's Show episodes.
