The Star-Studded Adult Swim Series You Forgot Was Created By Severance's Adam Scott

If you know Adam Scott through his work in the excellent science fiction thriller series "Severance" from Apple TV+, it's understandable that you may be a little taken aback that Scott's most consistent and best turns have come in comedy. "Severance" does have some black comedy elements to its workplace satire, in which a group of people have gone through the eponymous process of severance, in which they have an "innie" who works at a strange and mysterious multinational conglomerate and an "outie" who lives a life outside of work and has no idea what their innie does during the day (and vice versa for the innies knowing nothing about their outies). But that show is largely a dark thriller in which the main characters struggle to regain their independence while being controlled by the enigmatic people who run Lumon Industries.

Instead, Scott's work is best exemplified by his being a straight man in TV shows like "Party Down" (which impacted his career in a positive way) and "Parks and Recreation." In those shows, Scott displayed a similar talent for playing a straight-man type against more flamboyant characters, but in far less stressful and far funnier environments. Yet even people who may know Scott from these shows, as well as his deliciously snide role in the modern comedy classic "Step Brothers," may be shocked to know that in the mid-2010s, Scott co-created and co-directed a short miniseries featuring a lot of big-name actors for Adult Swim. It was called "The Greatest Event in Television History," and what better event to create than a series of remarkably detailed recreations of 1980s-era TV opening themes?

Each of the four installments of "The Greatest Event in Television History" was emceed by the host of the CBS reality show "Survivor," Jeff Probst, who was seen in a fancy auditorium wearing his finest tuxedo. The premise of each episode was that Probst would show a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes process of recreating the theme sequences for shows like "Simon & Simon," "Too Close for Comfort," "Hart to Hart," and "Bosom Buddies," none of which are shows that have quite the level of fame as modern TV series may have. The faux-pomp and circumstance of these trifling bits was coupled with an in-show countdown to the unveiling of the recreated theme, which would invariably only take up a minute or so of the actual episode. The level of detail in the recreations, with everything from hair and makeup to costuming to the faux-graininess of the image (captured by Scott and co-director Lance Bangs), is matched only by the jaw-dropping number of big-name stars who would show up either to take part in the recreation or the behind-the-scenes aspects.

For the "Simon & Simon" episode, Scott (who always took part directly in the recreations) is joined by "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm. In the "Hart to Hart" episode, Scott's joined by "Saturday Night Live" alums Amy Poehler and Horatio Sanz. It all climaxed with the "Bosom Buddies" episode, in which Scott and Paul Rudd play the leads once portrayed by Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, the two of whom make cameos in the episode along with musical icon Billy Joel, whose song "My Life" served as the theme music for "Bosom Buddies" when it aired in the 1980s. Other actors who showed up across the four episodes include Catherine O'Hara, Gillian Jacobs, Jason Mantzoukas, Chelsea Peretti, Kathryn Hahn, and Jon Glaser. Some of these names reflect actors who had either appeared in the world of Pawnee, Indiana in the NBC show "Parks and Recreation" (such as Glaser, Mantzoukas, and Hahn, as well as Peretti, who was a writer on that sitcom), but the show's cast is also a veritable who's who of modern alternative comedy, and they all fit in perfectly with the show's dry, tongue-in-cheek sensibility.

In the end, there were only four installments of "The Greatest Event in Television History," spread out between 2012 and 2014. The issue was never ratings — each episode gained roughly 1.5 million viewers in the Nielsens, implying that there was a consistent (if not mammoth) audience for this deadpan shtick. But as Scott had mentioned at the time, the amount of work that went into painstaking recreations of these cheesy opening themes (and whatever else you may think of the episodes, the recreations are pretty spot-on) ended up being more of an effort for such a minimal output. Of course, that's part of the joke of "The Greatest Event in Television History" — to have something built up so much and with so much fanfare and yet to be so slight. But at a certain point, the work felt too much compared to the reactions, as positive as they were.

Adam Scott has been one of the most reliably funny presences in modern television for years (and the same is true for podcasting, as he's co-hosted a number of comedy/music podcasts with "Comedy Bang! Bang!" star Scott Aukerman over the last decade). But if you know him primarily as Mark S. from the world of Lumon, or even Ben Wyatt from Pawnee or the man who once asked "Are we having fun yet?" in a dumb commercial, you may be a little shocked to know not only the famous friends he's worked with outside those more recognizable shows, but that he was once the man who came up with "The Greatest Event in Television History" (though the jury may be out on whether it truly was that great).