Stiller' Still Stellar In FX Retrospective by David Bianculli THE BEN STILLER SHOW. Sunday at 6 p.m. FX. This weekend, the most inventive sketch series since "SCTV" gets its due ó even though that due, at this point, is six years overdue. "The Ben Stiller Show" premiered on the Fox network in the fall of 1992, and lasted just long enough to see the calendar change to 1993. Only 13 episodes were made ó and Sunday night at 6, the FX cable network unspools all 13 in a welcome, comprehensive, 6 1/2-hour retrospective. What made Stiller's show so delightful? (This isn't revisionist history, by the way; I raved about "The Ben Stiller Show" when it premiered.) Three things: a great cast, an inspired comic sensibility and the best segues between skits since "Monty Python's Flying Circus." In addition to Stiller, who's now a movie star thanks to his self-effacing turn in "There's Something About Mary," the small core cast of "The Ben Stiller Show" also featured Janeane Garofalo (also a movie star now), Andy Dick ("NewsRadio") and Bob Odenkirk (who, today, enjoys the sort of outsider comic status Stiller did then). Most skits presumed a pop-culture appetite and awareness somewhere around the level of Dennis Miller. The pilot episode, for example, not only featured Stiller imitating Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, but also featured, as Bono's former manager, guest star David Madden, reprising his "Partridge Family" role of road manager Reuben Kinkaid. In the same show, Stiller plays Eddie Munster in a "Munsters" episode crossed with the Robert De Niro movie "Cape Fear" ó with Stiller imagining, and approximating, how De Niro might have played his psycho ex-con role, Munster-style. (In the same skit, Garofalo does a devastating lampoon of Juliette Lewis' lisping teen.) Other shows in the marathon provide a second, or first, opportunity to watch such nicely twisted comic gems as "Counting With Bruce Springsteen" (Stiller's Boss on "Sesame Street"); Dick as Woody Allen in a monster-movie Allen flick; a grunge-rock "Monkees" update called "The Grungies" and, most outrageously of all, Stiller* as Charles Manson. Charles Manson, that is, if Manson were a loyal human pet, like an incoherent, babbling, wild-eyed, bearded Lassie. "The Ben Stiller Show" didn't have a set. Stiller hosted the show by filming on the street, joking around with his writers and cast members (Garofalo, in these segments, is especially clever and charming). These bits were used, though, to set up and bridge all the other comic films and pieces, making each half-hour comedy a self-contained gem. Collect them all. Trade with friends. Fox made a mistake by axing this show the first time; don't make the mistake of missing it a second time. copyright 1999 New York Daily News. [*Note: Bob Odenkirk, rather than Stiller, played "Manson" in the sketch of the same name] Return to the main news page