Odd Job Jack
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Odd Job Jack is an animated comedy, featuring Don McKellar, about one guy's misadventures in temporary employment.
The eponymous character, Jack, graduates from university with a degree in Sociology and becomes a temporary employee at an agency which specializes in filling difficult and unusual positions. Each episode ends with Jack adding a chapter to a book which he is writing about his experiences on his laptop.
When not working Jack often hangs with his eccentric friends, an agorophobic computer hacker, who like one of the characters in McKellar's earlier comedy series, Twitch City, is unable to leave his apartment but nonetheless leads a complex and bizarre life, and an Asian kid who works in the family store by day, and is a club disc-jockey and masked hero by night.
Jack also spends some time at the beginning and end of each episode at the agency where he attempts to develop a rapport with the female assignment "associate" while under electronic surveillance from the gruff, imperious, and decidedly unpleasant, manager/owner who is often involved in some way in the bizarre conspiracies, sordid sexual escapades, and crimes which lurk behind the workaday appearances of Jack's assignments.
Among the unusual situations which in which Jack finds employment during the show's two seasons are mortuary worker; rodent wrangler on the set of a James Bond-like movie produced entirely with rodents; tree-planter in Bigfoot country; waiter in a chi-chi restaurant where something is definitely not right in the kitchen; security guard in a high-tech firm; Eighties-style business executive in a take-over firm; and Christian theme-park employee. None of these assignments are as straight-forward as they seem. Jack's co-workers and employers can only be describedly as contentedly psychotic.
In the rodent wrangler episode, Don McKellar plays and parodies himself as a stereotypical vain, role-hungry and superficial actor, as well as voicing the anti-hero, Jack, and is the subject of a self-depreciatory episode based on Being John Malkovich in which a tunnel is dug from Jack's kitchen into Don McKellar's actor's ego.
There are also a number of sly allusions in the episode to Don McKellar's movies including The Red Violin/(Le Violon rouge)(1998) and Highway 61(1991).
The show features voice work by a number of Canadian celebrities, especially in the second season, including the Barenaked Ladies and Gordon Pinsent who either play themselves or voice one of the show's eccentric, if not mad, characters.