"RE-RELEASE: Will Ferrell”

Sean Hayes's surprise guest is Will Ferrell, and after an opening bit where the hosts try playing each other, the conversation turns into a genuine origin story. Ferrell grew up in Irvine watching his father — sax and keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers — get hired and fired at the drop of a hat, and it made him diametrically opposed to entertainment: he wanted a briefcase job. He studied sports journalism at USC, worked at an Orange County cable-access news station, and got his light-bulb moment when the editor asked for a volunteer to interview Rams head coach John Robinson. Forty classmates' hands shot up; his stayed down, worrying about checking out a camera and paying for parking. If he didn't have that hunger, he reasoned, he should chase the thing gnawing at him instead — so he signed up for his first Groundlings class.

The Harry Caray character came later, during the baseball strike, while Ferrell worked as an appraisal coordinator at the art auction house where his future wife Viveca worked. Driving home for lunch, he'd catch Cubs broadcasts and couldn't believe what the announcer said on air. He built a sketch around Caray doing a melodramatic play reading with no games to announce, with actress Maggie Baird genuinely crying through her lines — and later performed an augmented version as his SNL audition, alone in a pitch-black Studio 8H with Lorne watching from the shadows.

The rest ranges through the character stuff the show does best: Ferrell's dream blue-collar job (mail carrier, on foot, with the trolley), the bank customer who summoned a manager mid-transaction to announce 'this guy is your worst teller' — a verdict Ferrell accepted — wearing a 'Hello, my name is Will' name tag to his kids' school events, his loathing of unit publicists' drive-by set visits, and the charity golf tournament his dad's friend invented by claiming Tiger Woods was already in. It ends on quarantine-era domesticity: walking Peanut and Cosmo, sweeping the house for hidden devices, and the time he threw his 13-year-old son Mattias's phone out of a slowly moving car to prove a point.