Well well...didn't THIS show have a bit going for it, in concept and all.
Another one of the "what if?" scenarios, as God and the devil have teamed up (I guess?) to see if the human race is worthwhile or not. They pick an Everyday Man to study and judge...and lets give him an Everyday Man name, like Bob. Perfect!
Actually, pretty much everyone is given the Everyday Man treatment, which leads to some pretty funny moments. The first one that comes to my mind is how God is portrayed: he's not given the bright light behind him, angels singing, flowing beard-type treatment that we'd all expect from Him...rather, his beard is shorter, he wears t-shirts and looks like a hippie, which, in all actuality, he was modeled after Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. Like I said, when He comes down to Earth, God has problems that we all have, like getting ripped off by a candy machine; not even God the Almighty can retrieve his candy bar from the blasted machine!
Sometimes this leads to jokes that don't even need punchlines; for instance, I thought it was hilarious to have God rummaging around in Bob's refrigerator, popping a cold one and saying "this is good beer!"...I guess it was just funny because I have no idea what on earth God would even WANT to drink a beer, much less find it good ("...and it was good", as the text says).
Granted, "what if?"-type shows, movies, short stories, etc. have been done pretty much since the beginning of the written word...however, a few original traits still managed to appear. At one point, Bob just says the solution to saving mankind is to remove all evil...which God does, proving that this is not so, since good cannot exist without evil (which IS true in real life).
So Bob goes to work, and since there's no evil, everyone is singing at their dead-end job...which, by the end of the day, is almost enough to make Bob puke. Luckily though, that night is his friend's bachelor party, which he has been looking forward to all day. The big moment arrives when a scantily-clad stripper WOULD pop out of the oversized cake, but since there's no Lust or anything, out pops his friends' parents...to give advice on how their long marriage has endured. "What, no STRIPPER?" exclaims Bob. "Well that'd be RUDE!" answers the guy next to him.
This show had the same potential as Third Rock from the Sun: just on the idea ALONE it could've ran forever. In Third Rock, aliens come to earth to study mankind, which everyday life (that's nothing/normal to us) is weird to them (actually it's funny how I make this comparison, since French Stewart from that show voiced Bob on this one), so there was plenty of material to keep that show running, and the same went for God, the Devil and Bob.
Unfortunately, this show had "death warrant" written all over it from it's inception: first was just MAKING a religious spoof; when the show was axed, the network said that the religious outcry didn't have much of a factor, but you KNOW it had SOME. Next was trying to make a prime-time cartoon show make it; it was a very long time in between The Flintstones and The Simpsons before that happened, and several others failed (Fish Police, Capitol Critters, etc.). Last, I think they ran it against something popular...like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or something. So it was killed within only about three shows, I think.
Pity.
