David Cross and Bob Odenkirk’s new TV show got killed by “marketing and analytics”

We only get one really major David Cross/Bob Odenkirk project once a decade or so—with the Mr. Show duo coming back together most recently for Netflix’s W/ Bob And David in 2015. We would have been on track to get another one pretty soon, but, according to Cross, Paramount+’s “marketing and analytics department” killed the entire thing. As a great man once shouted, pretty frequently, across a multi-year comedy and drama career: God DAMN it!

This is per Variety, and comes from a podcast interview Cross actually did last month, where he talked with Andrew Santino’s Whiskey Ginger podcast about comedy and his career. (The relevant bit starts at 18:15 in the above link.) During the conversation, Cross got onto the topic of Guru Nation, a show he and Odenkirk worked up back in the early 2020s, and eventually—after what he describes as a low-key bidding war between multiple networks—ended up taking to Paramount+. According to Cross, he and Odenkirk wrote half of the eight-episode show (about two rival cult leaders attempting to out-manipulate each other) and plotted out the rest, took it to their new partners…and had the whole thing get turned down by the streamer.

Cross (speaking with a mixture of diplomacy and obvious despondency) says he was told by Paramount that, ultimately, the whole project got vetoed by the company’s marketing and analytics department, who didn’t want the series, or “get” how to sell it. “They have all the fucking power!” Cross noted, drawing parallels between this latest project and his and Odenkirk’s infamously messy Mr. Show movie, Run, Ronnie, Run. And while we would argue that, if streaming TV doesn’t exist specifically in order to let David Cross and Bob Odenkirk fuck around with 8 episodes of a really weird idea once per decade, it doesn’t really have any reason to be around, we ourselves are also not in either marketing or analytics, and so also don’t have all the fucking power. Alas!