Odd Job Jack
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Odd Job Jack is a Canadian animated comedy television show featuring Don McKellar, about one guy's misadventures in temporary employment. The show is currently in production of its fourth season.
The eponymous character, Jack, graduates from university with a degree in sociology and becomes a temporary employee at an agency which specializes in filling difficult and unusual positions. Each episode ends with Jack adding a chapter to a book which he is writing about his experiences on his laptop.
When not working, Jack often hangs with his eccentric friends, Leo, an agoraphobic computer hacker who, like one of the characters in McKellar's earlier comedy series, Twitch City, is unable to leave his apartment but nonetheless leads a complex and bizarre life, and Bobby, an Asian kid who works in the family store by day, and is a club disc-jockey and masked hero by night.
Jack also spends some time at the beginning and end of each episode at the agency where he attempts to develop a rapport with Betty, the female assignment "associate" while under electronic surveillance from the gruff, imperious, and decidedly unpleasant, manager/owner who is often involved in some way in the bizarre conspiracies, sordid sexual escapades, and crimes which lurk behind the workaday appearances of Jack's assignments.
Among the unusual situations which in which Jack finds employment during the show's three seasons are mortuary worker; rodent wrangler on the set of a James Bond-like movie produced entirely with rodents; tree-planter in Bigfoot country; waiter in a chi-chi restaurant where something is definitely not right in the kitchen; security guard in a high-tech firm; Eighties-style business executive in a take-over firm; and Christian theme-park employee. None of these assignments are as straight-forward as they seem. Jack's co-workers and employers can only be describedly as contentedly psychotic.
In the rodent wrangler episode, McKellar plays and parodies himself as a stereotypical vain, role-hungry and superficial actor, as well as voicing the anti-hero, Jack, and is the subject of a self-deprecatory episode based on Being John Malkovich in which a tunnel is dug from Jack's kitchen into McKellar the actor's ego.
There are also a number of sly allusions in the episode to McKellar's movies, including The Red Violin (1998) and Highway 61 (1991).
The show features voice work by a number of largely Canadian celebrities, especially after the first season: celebrities appear occasionally on the second season, and the third season has a special celebrity guest star for each episode, who either play themselves or voice one of the show's eccentric, if not mad, characters. Celebrities in the first season were Dave Foley, Troy Hurtubise and Gary Farmer. The second season featured the Barenaked Ladies, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, John O'Hurley, Christopher Plummer, Catherine O'Hara and Don Knotts. And the third season sees Tom Arnold, Scott Thompson, Megan Follows, James Woods, Tom Green, Leslie Nielsen, Rick Mercer, Will Arnett and Samantha Bee accompany Jack on his adventures in the weird world of work.
Odd Job Jack is created by Smiley Guy Studios in Toronto, Ontario. The show was originally developed as a web-based cartoon, but quickly moved to cable television distribution. The producers of the show pay homage to their web roots by maintaining an web site that contains unique interactive content to support each episode.