Dr katz how many seasons

Dom Irrera Dom as Dom …. Ray Romano Ray as Ray. Fred Stoller Fred as Fred. Louis C. Louis as Louis. Ron Lynch Ron as Ron …. Sam Brown Sam as Sam. Kevin Meaney Kevin as Kevin …. Dave Attell Dave as Dave …. Bill Braudis Bill as Bill.

Andy Kindler Andy as Andy. Lew Schneider Lew as Lew …. Wanda Sykes Self as Self …. Jonathan Katz Tom Snyder. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. A divorced father, he has custody of his year-old slacker son Ben, who dreams of wealth and freedom but is too lazy to find a real job. Katz's receptionist is the acerbic Laura. He spends his free time in the bar "Jacky's 33" with his friends Stan and Julie, the bartender.

Did you know Edit. Jon Benjamin , Benjamin's girlfriend Laura Silverman sometimes answered the phone. Jonathan was so smitten with Laura's tone of bored indifference that she became his prime candidate for Laura the Receptionist.

Quotes Ben Katz : You know what you are, Laura? Laura : What am I? Connections Edited into Heroes of Jewish Comedy User reviews 36 Review. Top review. I'm fallin' hard for Dr. While it lasted, this was one of the funniest animated shows ever to turn up on TV. It was a brilliant idea to take standup comedy and pour it into the psychologist-patient mold; it fits perfectly.

I still laugh thinking about Ray Romano talking about how his wife forces him to go downstairs to check out noises in the night I hope it will all be out on DVD soon. Rosabel Mar 25, Details Edit. Release date May 28, United States. United States. Katz has influenced many animated shows in its wake they pay homage to it in an episode of Arthur , for goodness' sake , but no entity so crystal clear as Adult Swim, even in contemporary shows like 12 oz.

Bringing it back to the sources, SGC2C has directly referenced and paid tribute to Katz in two episodes of its run. In season four's "Brilliant Number One," Space Ghost appears for a brief moment in a squiggly, hand-drawn, Katz ian animation style when he asks Peter Fonda the very Katz ian question, "What does this tell us about your childhood?

Jon Benjamin as a guest, Space Ghost appears in this style again when he insists how important cable television is to him. The show itself, regardless of what anybody says, was really about a father and a son, and a shrink and his receptionist.

The comedians were really wonderful, but the show was really about Dr. Katz and his son Ben. It's weird that so many live-action TV shows feel cartoonish, and this cartoon felt so real. That's Katz speaking about the emotional and tonal center of Dr. Katz , and he's not wrong on any count. Yes, the hook of each episode was to see which famous comic would show up this time, but Dr. Katz's interactions with Laura were what grounded the character, and Dr.

Katz's interactions with Ben were what grounded us. And while other notable adult animated shows at the time were at times diving into their characters' emotions, rather than jokes, for episode engines particularly the James L. Brooks era of The Simpsons , Dr. Katz did so with unprecedented intimacy. The raw animation style and improvised method of dialogue left no shields up, leaving a clear look directly into human hearts and foibles.

The first year Dr. A lot of these shows are influential, of quality, and do feature the emotional relationships of family and friends at their core. But Katz's point that they feel more cartoonish than his own cartoon stands. They're all multi-cam sitcoms, of course, rendered in bright, flat lighting and wide open frames perfect for kinetic, mugging physical comedy. Narratively, the lessons learned in each episode are either tidily wrapped up in a self-contained bow, or completely eschewed in service of jokes i.

And especially in the case of shows like NewsRadio , Drew Carey , and Martin , they're eager to dive into flights of visually surreal fancy, themed episodes, and performances seasoned with sketch comedy broadness.

Undoubtedly, these shows feel much more like a "traditional cartoon" than Dr. Katz ever did. The muted realism and emotional acuity of Dr. Katz hit live-action TV comedies with a ripple effect, too. Without this show's influence in the mids through earlys, we don't get adventurously dramatic, complicated sitcoms like Titus , Malcolm in the Middle , or Scrubs.

We don't get the enforced realism in aesthetics and character focus in mockumentaries like The Office or to a lesser extent Modern Family. And we definitely don't see the slide into out-and-out dramedies or even "half-hour dramas with some jokes" that occurs in the late s into the s; acclaimed shows like Transparent , Nurse Jackie , Girls , and Russian Doll are all in the wake, in facets big and small, of Dr. This leads me back to Katz's original downplaying of the "comedians talking as themselves" component of his show.

Is it a hook or gimmick? But it just might be the most influential component of the show, especially as it relates to live action comedies. So many of our most celebrated contemporary prestige TV comedies have a familiar premise: Give a known comedy figure a ton of creative control, room to experiment with the visual language, a narrative casting them as an only slightly modified version of themselves, and an absolute non-requirement of jokes though jokes usually still happen. Katz warmed us up for this inside-baseball, potentially alienating self-examination of "comedians as themselves" by proving an emotion-driven chat with stand-up comics minus the veneer of a character or standard sitcom plot still equals entertainment.

Without it, comics like Larry David , Louis C. Do you watch Bob's Burgers? If your answer ain't "Of course! The program is a delightful breath of fresh air, a warm and gentle family comedy whose currency beyond its perfect gags and unexpected flights of fancy is empathy. For these reasons alone, I'd call Bob's Burgers "the" worthy successor to Dr. Katz , Professional Therapist. But it also represents the perfect confluence of two important figures in contemporary animated comedy.

One is Bob's Burgers ' creator, the other its star -- and both got their start on Dr. I'm speaking about the two B's: Loren Bouchard, and H. Jon Benjamin. Bouchard was recruited to work on Dr. Katz by co-creator Snyder, and served as a producer during the entire series run.

As that series wrapped up, Bouchard collaborated with another big B in the world of animated comedy -- Brendon Small -- and created Home Movies , a program which shared Dr. Katz 's small-scale tone, animation style, improvised methodology of writing, and castmates Benjamin played two iconic roles, and Katz showed up as a regular guest star, too. After that show, Bouchard worked as a producer on The Ricky Gervais Show another animated comedy based on improvised conversations with comedians as themselves and created Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil also starring Benjamin.

But when he created Bob's Burgers , casting Benjamin in the lead role, he found his own Dr. And, in terms of production techniques, he borrowed what he learned from Dr. Katz whole cloth. Bob's Burgers ' cast which also includes Kristen Schaal , Eugene Mirman , Dan Mintz , Larry Murphy , and John Roberts records their episodes in the same room, to capture that spontaneous, overlapping, improvisatory energy present on Dr.

Katz , even as the scripts are tighter. As he said to the AV Club :. Having the actors together is one of the most important things that we can do. They feed off each other. They get a kick out of each other, and again, that goes back to that tone that Benjamin brings as Bob.

Katz when Jonathan Katz and Benjamin were just cracking each other up in the booth. That was something we put in almost every episode, but it was real. Bouchard has also spoken to Vulture about his expectations for cartoon dialogue to feel as natural and conversational as possible, likening it to "a bit of an obsession, and I suffer from it almost like somebody with OCD in a way.