The writing team also included Louis C.K., Charlie Kaufman, Jon Glaser, Dino Stamatopoulos, Spike Feresten, and Robert Carlock.

In addition, Carvey and Smigel's former Saturday Night Live colleague Greg Daniels contributed material for the premiere episode.

Robert Smigel turned down an offer to rejoin SNL as a producer, favoring the challenge of working with Carvey in prime time.

Smigel has expressed satisfaction, however, in the outcome of working under such restrictions and believes the show would have found a greater balance had it been given more time on the air.

The network originally planned on airing ten episodes[5] and did not interfere with the show's creativity, simply wanting a good lead-in to NYPD Blue.

The Dana Carvey Show also attempted to put The Onion on television with Stephen Colbert reporting as an anchor in deadpan style.

"[3] Carvey also recreated some of the characters he developed on Saturday Night Live, including his signature Church Lady, and parodied the news of the day, as well as the media, politics, commercialism, and other sketch comedy shows.

One such example, Discovery Channel After Dark, featured an edited montage of wild animals mating, and performing other actions that would be considered obscene if shown being done by their human counterparts.

Additionally, a sketch used in the unaired eighth episode about Tom Brokaw prerecording the announcement of Gerald Ford's death was used verbatim when Carvey hosted Saturday Night Live on October 26, 1996.

Shortly after the show's debut, however, PepsiCo announced that its units Taco Bell and Pizza Hut had pulled advertising which would have brought in $600,000 per episode.

However, the duo considered the program less racy by today's standards, stating, "If you take out the teats and a few things, maybe the Mountain Dew, mostly it was clean and silly and abstract."

"[1] Nevertheless, Carvey expressed pride in the program serving as Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert's launchpad and in its creative approach: "We did not compromise anything, literally, in a completely commercialized environment, and did exactly what we wanted - for better or for worse."

Colbert has also offered credit to the show's format for developing his satirical onscreen persona, stating, "If you have an opportunity to give it right to the audience, there’s a special connection that you make by looking at the camera.

Smigel's Ambiguously Gay Duo concept carried on with further installments on Saturday Night Live and led to the creation of several other cartoons.

Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert were later cast on Comedy Central's Daily Show where its co-creator, Madeleine Smithberg, was a fan of their "waiters nauseated by food" sketch.

The series in its entirety (including an eighth episode unaired by ABC) has been available on iTunes, Joost and at no charge on Hulu, Crackle, and YouTube.

[7] Upon its debut, Joyce Millman of Salon called the series a "rousing blast of kamikaze satire" and summed up by declaring, "In his relentless flogging of the advertiser-driven TV biz, Carvey delivered prime time's funniest biting-the-feeding-hand stuff since Michael Moore's short-lived NBC (and briefly, Fox) series TV Nation.

"[5] Caryn James of The New York Times, however, gave a negative review, claiming, "the debut already looked tired and old" adding, "Right now, the Carvey writers had better be thinking up something edgier than a dancing mug of root beer.

"[2] Entertainment Weekly's Alynda Wheat gave the DVD a B− and proclaimed "You can see why Carell and Colbert became famous [...] But just as clear is that Carvey was too wildly hit-or-miss to work.

In October 2017, streaming service Hulu released a documentary entitled Too Funny to Fail that details the show's rise and fall.