Comedy Bang! Bang!: “Mary Elizabeth Winstead”

At its core, the Comedy Bang! Bang! TV show is essentially a live-action cartoon. With each episode, anything can happen and does so with a logic that makes sense in this universe. So in “Mary Elizabeth Winstead,” when we discover that there has been a child star living in the walls of the CBB studio for thirty years, it doesn’t feel like a surprise. It’s more like, “Of course there is, why wouldn’t there be?” “Mary Elizabeth Winstead” is one of the funniest episodes of this season because it goes all-in with its cartoony aesthetic, and does so exceptionally well.

The episode starts with maybe one of my favorite framing devices this season, as we learn more about the history of the CBB studio. Thirty years ago, a show called Fancy Forks was canceled in the middle of the episode. During the episode, a character named Donald was playing hide-and-seek and just continued to play the game within the walls of the studio. Thirty years later, Donald (Steve Agee) remains in the walls, occasionally stealing Kid Cudi’s chocolate, leaving Scott and Cudi to believe that there’s a rat in the walls, which they need to get rid of before the Television Department Health inspector shows up.

This whole bit works because Agee is always hilarious, especially in his ability to seem innocent, even when awful things are happening to him. In this episode, he loses a finger, gets punched in the nuts and has an entire half of his body covered in nails. But his childishness—probably a result of the fact that he’s been living in the studio and surviving on stray chocolate—makes the entire segment work. But the whole idea works because of the payoff, when the inspector that shows up happens to be Donald’s Fancy Forks costar.