Andrew Edmund Kane

Appropriately, this is the program that encouraged me to begin this project. Not only because the show’s theme – a few basic ukulele chords repeated a couple of times – was simple enough, but also because Bob’s Burgers has become for me the archetypal “background” show. I have had it on while I worked, while I slept, while I cooked and ate; I’ve had it on after I spent too many days in a row by myself and needed to hear someone’s voice that wasn’t the cat’s or my own. And the voices of Bob’s Burgers have been around me since my childhood: H. Jon Benjamin, Ron Lynch, and the Silverman sisters all voiced characters on Dr. Katz, which I can remember watching, in the dark, at my father’s house, at age eight or nine; Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, and others on the show have been with me for the better part of a decade now as well. (This year marks the tenth anniversary of Schaal’s appearance, in a non-speaking role, among the switchboard operators in the Mad Men pilot.) Bob’s Burgers also holds the dubious distinction of having induced me to eat more (admittedly soy-based) burgers than perhaps any other TV show.

“Bob’s Burgers” theme written by Loren Bouchard.