Pilkington is the de facto star of HBO's new animated series, "The Ricky Gervais Show," kicking off tonight at 9. True fans of Gervais know that when almost everyone else had abandoned the format, he breathed new life into podcasting, setting a Guinness Book of Records mark for most downloads when the British newspaper the Guardian started posting them online.

The producer of those podcasts was one Karl Pilkington, whose "offbeat musings," as HBO generously puts it, were the backbone for Gervais and Merchant to riff endlessly and laugh uproariously. See, Pilkington, a very soft-spoken chap, tended to come up with all kinds of wild notions, delivered laconically, which sent his much faster-talking hosts into a tizzy.

Whether he was talking about the news, some study he'd just heard about (but probably didn't fully consider) or merely his anecdotal observations from looking around his small world, Pilkington became the star of Gervais' wildly random podcasts.

For those people who listened to those early offerings, it seemed like eavesdropping into one of the weirdest and funniest inside jokes that two funny people could have had while in a pub or over lunch. And that was the beauty of the Gervais podcasts - they weren't intended to make much sense. Just turn on the microphone and away we go.

The free-form looseness tapped into the comic genius of both Gervais and Merchant, whose lightning-quick one-liners were as hilarious as Gervais' hysterically funny rambles.

As Pilkington talked about monkeys in space, Gervais squeals with delight. There's almost nothing as funny as Gervais laughing so hard he can't stop.

"It's the rambling of a madman," he says of Pilkington's take on life. When the quiet producer, who seems utterly unfazed by being gleefully mocked, says he has some news about a scientific discovery, Merchant and Gervais grant him a moment to explain. You know the notion of the five senses, Pilkington asks? Well, "there's loads more." And with that, the searing riffs began at Pilkington's expense. "This is rubbish," Gervais says. "This is absolute bollocks."

Media Rights Capital, an independent production company, took an offbeat idea and made it work surprisingly well. It took those Gervais podcasts, verbatim, and animated them. That way, when Pilkington talked about monkeys in space or whatnot, the pleasure of hearing this rollicking nonsense through headphones was fleshed out with animated sequences playing off whatever the subject was.

Imagine a cartoonist illustrating someone's stand-up comedy act while it was in progress and you kind of get what "The Ricky Gervais Show" is all about. HBO loved the idea and decided to pair it with the second season of its wonderful, under-the-radar animated series "The Life & Times of Tim," one of the funniest half hours of animation to hit television in September 2008.

S.F. writer's creation

Created and written by San Franciscan Steve Dildarian, "The Life & Times of Tim" is a brilliant take on one man's repeated bad decisions (mostly made from niceness or naivete - and sometimes desperation). Voiced by Dildarian, Tim sounds partly like a slacker, partly like the laconic Pilkington mentioned above.

Just a guy whose pulse barely fluctuates above normal - nonplussed that he's just said something outrageous or been coaxed into something that will inevitably go horribly wrong. Like last year when Tim had a misunderstanding with an angry hooker. Or when the massive, cold corporation that Tim works for talked him into pretending to be Latino. And so it goes, one man's inability to say no combined with his ability to say yes to the wrong things.

Among the early humiliations this season, Tim's company prefers a homeless beggar to him. And when Tim finds out his best friend, Stu (Nick Kroll), has been smoking pot through most of his friendship, Tim's forced to go along with Stu's pursuit to buy more, which unfortunately ends up with Tim sitting through one of the worst plays ever staged.

Flat and simple

The genius in "The Life & Times of Tim" is that the animation is flat and simple - line drawings that are as low-fi as the tone of the show. This lack of flash allows the writing and voice performances to shine through.

Most of what happens in this series is droll, acidic or searingly simple. That's the joy of it - Tim's life gets spun sideways, and humor is derived from his polite, deferential suffering. Even when "Tim" is painfully funny, the nuance of the jokes remain the catalyst.

It's quite likely that "The Life & Times of Tim" will no longer be the funniest show you've never heard of or you're not watching. The first season is out on DVD now and tons of comics and hipsters have sung its praise, a la "The Flight of the Conchords." This season, guest voices on "Tim" include Aziz Ansari, Jennifer Coolidge, Will Forte, Elliott Gould, Bonnie Hunt, Judah Friedlander, Wendie Malick, Debi Mazar, Alfred Molina and Cheri Oteri.

Even when you're as low-key as Tim is, you're bound to get noticed eventually. At least this time he doesn't have to apologize profusely for it.