It is a truth not quite universally acknowledged that Ben Stiller is a lazy hack whose schtick ceased being amusing long ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan. But he’s had his funny moments in the past. Take the clip below, a compilation of footage from Stiller’s appearance in the penultimate episode of Freaks and Geeks. The clip opens with a minute or so of footage that actually aired, then segues into a seven-minute uncut take from the filming of the scene. I pulled the raw footage off of one of the two extra DVDs included with the special eight-disc F&G fan edition. (The collection sold in stores only has six discs.)

In the episode, Stiller guest-stars as a disgruntled Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who has traveled to McKinley High for an appearance. Stiller’s character becomes suspicious of the school’s longhaired guidance counselor, Mr. Rosso, and escorts him down the hall to Rosso’s office.

Stiller’s riffing in the raw footage is very funny; it’s interesting to watch him try out different approaches to various lines, and to see him react to the coaching from the episode’s director, Jake Kasdan. There’s also a good George W. Bush reference, made more hilarious by the fact that the scene was filmed in early 2000, when Bush’s blundering numbskullery hadn’t yet affected the world.

Extras, the new show from Ricky Gervais, premiered on BBC2 last Thursday, and pirated versions of the first episode have already landed online. The series will eventually be broadcast on HBO, but you can watch the premiere right now by BitTorrenting the file. There are two different .torrents of the Extras premiere on this page. The one called “Extras.S01E01.PDTV.XviD-mVzTV.avi” played fine on my G5 iMac, but the other one, “Extras-S01-E01.avi,” appeared not to have an audio track. For whatever that’s worth.

If you’ve never BitTorrented something before, just do this: (1) Download a BitTorrent application. I use Azureus, which has versions for Mac OS X, Windows, and various other operating systems. (2) Go to the page linked above and download the .torrent. A .torrent is a tiny file that points your BitTorrent application to the much bigger file that you want to download. (3) Open the .torrent in Azureus or some other BitTorrent application. (4) Wait several hours while the 250-megabyte file pours itself onto your hard drive. More info about BitTorrent is here.

Anyway, onto the show itself. It’s pretty good—better than most shows—but so far it’s no Office. Not that I really expected Gervais to match the world-historical genius of that show. Gervais stars as the aspiring actor Andy Millman, a chunky middle-aged hanger-on who has never risen above the occasional gig playing an extra. He’s desperate to land a speaking part, even if it’s only a few lines. Millman has more than a little bit in common with David Brent—the questionable motives, the thwarted ambition, the tendency to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time—but Millman is more self-aware and less solipsistic than Brent was. He’s also easier to like. Millman even has a friend and ally, a cute fellow extra played by Ashley Jensen, whom I like a lot so far. It’s weird to see a David Brent-ish Ricky Gervais interacting normally with another human being.

Extras is going to feature appearances by various major stars. In the premiere, Ben Stiller plays an exaggerated version of himself: a humorless, megalomaniacal comedy star who is directing a serious war picture. It’s the same old Stiller shtick: the self-absorbed asshole who can barely contain his rage. The shtick has gotten really old at this point. Does anyone still find it funny?