In his tortoiseshell glasses and a gray wool sweater, Mr. “He’s basically a surlier version of myself,” Mr. His new show is “Eagleheart,” a demented live-action comedy on the Cartoon Network he portrays a “Walker, Texas Ranger”-esque United States marshal who can explode bad guys with a single punch but fails to understand the basics of law enforcement or, really, human interaction. Elliott will try to challenge that history starting on Thursday as he returns in his first lead role in more than a decade. His brilliance and influence have been rightly celebrated, but when it comes to mainstream stardom, things have just had a way of not quite working out. For close to three decades, he’s been revered by the industry’s humor cognoscenti the kind of guy funny people find funny but struggled to connect with a wider audience. Elliott paused for a moment to chuckle at the thought of himself consoling “the kid over at NBC.” “Within six months,” he went on, “ ‘Seinfeld’ was a huge hitand I was off the air.” So it goes in the star-crossed career of Chris Elliott. My memory is of him being really depressed and saying, ‘Jeez, I don’t know how you guys do it’ and me saying” he adopted a tone of reassuring condescension “ ‘Hey, come on your show is funny too!’ ” Elliott recalled recently over breakfast in Manhattan, “Seinfeld’s show was getting better ratings than ours, but because we were on Fox and they were on NBC, ours was doing better in comparison. Elliott, he was a few months into the show’s rocky first season when, on a flight home for Thanksgiving, he happened to be seated next to another struggling network-TV rookie one Jerry Seinfeld. Elliott the comic actor best known for his supporting roles in “There’s Something About Mary” and “Groundhog Day” was then a hungry up-and-comer who had recently landed his own sitcom on Fox called “Get a Life.” According to Mr. HERE’S an entry from Chris Elliott’s file of What Might Have Been:
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