When Andy Barker, P.I. premiered two and a half years ago, I leapt on every one of its six episodes and walked away disappointed each time. With two of its stars coming off of greatly beloved (by me) shows — Andy Richter from the delightfully crackpot Andy Richter Controls The Universe and Tony Hale from the impossibly great Arrested Development — it was probably inevitable that the short-lived reluctant-but-unexpectedly-skilled-detective series would seem like a letdown by comparison.

But that was my problem, not Andy Barker's, and the passage of time recalibrated my expectations so that when I sat down with the full-series DVD (out today), I was shocked at just how funny it really was. No, it's not Controls The Universe, but — unlike Controls The Universe creator Victor Fresco's recent repackaging of the same concept, the almost-as-sharp Better Off Ted on ABC — it wasn't trying to be.

Despite Richter's involvement in both (behind the scenes as well as on camera) and their shared cheerful surrealism, the sensibilities and velocities were entirely different. Not just different, in fact, but opposite: the wound-up Controls The Universe took the everyday routines of office-drone life and squeezed them until they warped, whereas the ambling Andy Barker strip-mined the seedy underbelly of society to find the hilariously mundane that lies beneath.

You don't have to take my word for it that Andy Barker is a neat little gem that merits a fresh look, though.

Where to find the episodes, after the jump.

 

For the time being, all six episodes can be found on Hulu. Although the pilot sets up the premise of the show (mild-mannered accountant Barker inherits the old office of a noir-caricature private eye and accidentally picks up his vocation as well), I recommend starting with "Three Days Of The Chicken" if you think you'll need convincing.

Hinging on an investigation into a shady poultry concern, it's just about flawless, wringing laughs from words such as "boilbecue," "cloaca" and "Mother Hubbard" while recognizing how truly stupid they actually sound to the characters. It also provides the late Harve Presnell with a comic tour de force as hard-boiled old-school gumshoe Lew Staziak coming face-to-face with his worst nightmare.

So why bother with the DVD if you can watch it for free online? The fact is, you could knock out the complete run of the show in barely two hours either way. And maybe that will give you all the Andy Barker you want. What you'll miss, though, is commentaries that are, for once, indispensable. Featuring a rotating combination of writers, producers and actors, they're not so much discussions about the nuts and bolts of every episode as they are excuses for funny people to bounce off of one another. They make it sound as though working on the show was the most purely enjoyable experience they'd ever had, and they slip right back into the task of being as wryly freewheeling as they were when Andy Barker still had cases to solve. It's the closest thing to six new episodes that we're ever going to get, which means that Hulu might be free, but it's only half the story.