Comic Neal Brennan's new TV gig is a walk in the snark

Neal Brennan's show-biz career is going exactly according to his devious plan.

"I'm going to give my best years to writing," the slender comedian says. "Then when my looks hit the wall, I'm going to move over to performing."

So after decades of gag-writing, including as the cocreator of the seminal Chappelle's Show, Brennan, 40, has thrust himself in the spotlight, both as a stand-up and as the host of Sundance TV's new series The Approval Matrix (Monday at 11 p.m.)

The Villanova native opens each episode with an arrestingly caustic monologue, then introduces a shifting panel of comics, actors, journalists, and TV personalities to snarkily debate pop-culture issues.

The format was inspired by (and the title appropriated from) the back page of New York Magazine, which classifies water-cooler events on a Cartesian quadrant of Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, and Despicable.

Not that Brennan had much to do with the show's concept. He was recruited late in the game.

"As a comedian, you're always up for projects whether you realize it or not," he says. "You're on TV fairly often, so people are aware of you. I wish I could say it was more complicated. Like they saw me in a bar pontificating."

He's expecting The Approval Matrix to ruffle feathers. "I'm sure people will get mad," he says. As far as Brennan is concerned, the more audacious, the better.

"If I could be like Charles Barkley, that would really please me," he says. "There's something about Charles that is so jagged and unpolished, it's amazing. Everyone on TV is full of it, and he's not."

Brennan is used to looking up to people. He's the youngest in a family of 10 that moved from Villanova to Wayne to Chicago and back to Wayne.

That's a lot of siblings. "It was chaotic," he allows. "It was like growing up in a combination youth hostel and monkey house."

When Neal was a student at Radnor's Archbishop Carroll High School, one of his brothers, Kevin, was trying to break in as a stand-up in New York City. The teenager would go up the city to visit as often as possible.

"It was transformative," he says of the experience. "It was really helpful to spend time with a young Dave Attell and a young Ray Romano.

"The scary part," he continues, "was taking SEPTA to Jersey Transit. That was straight-up Third World."

He was admitted to the film school at New York University largely, he says, on the basis of a short film he had made while at Archbishop Carroll, a humorously modern take on MacBeth.

But he soon faced a formidable dissuader: Brennan couldn't stand his classmates.

"I hated film students. I thought they were insufferable and they thought my taste was so mainstream," he says. "The most pretentious guy there was always talking about Wim Wenders. Now he's editing highlights for the Mets, and I've got a TV show. That's been pretty satisfying."

He dropped out after a year, working as a doorman at a comedy club where he forged a friendship with a young aspiring comedian named Dave Chappelle.

Together they wrote the farcical pot film Half Baked and eventually collaborated on the groundbreaking Comedy Central series Chappelle's Show.

The wild success of the program took Brennan somewhat unawares.

"We were in Las Vegas and people were saying, 'I'm Rick James, bitch,' " he recalls. It was the tagline in one of the show's most notorious recurring sketches. "I really didn't understand why anybody would say, 'I'm Rick James, bitch' at a blackjack table. I guess it was a display of power."

The two had a falling-out shortly before Chappelle walked away from the series - and a new $50 million contract - at the start of the third season.

"It was starting to get unpleasant between me and Dave," says Brennan. "Comedy Central kind of played both of us against the middle. I found it personally painful and insulting."

The two men have spoken in the intervening years but have never resumed their work relationship.

After the show abruptly ended, Neal Brennan the writer decided to transition to Neal Brennan the performer.

But he had a couple of fallbacks. "Now I see it as playing craps," he says. "'I'll put five dollars on everything'."

He's increasingly in demand as a director, after helming the 2009 film The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard with Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, and James Brolin.

"Ving Rhames is the biggest gossip I've ever met," Brennan interjects. "To hear him gossip in that deep baritone is a pleasure. As soon as you hear, 'Can I be honest with you, brother?' you know you're about to hear something crazy."

He's branched out to directing episodic television, including numerous episodes of the Comedy Central series Inside Amy Schumer.

"I love Neal. He is one of my best friends," says Schumer via e-mail. "His show is hilarious and so is he. It's honest and in-your-face just like him. This is too much nice [stuff]. He dresses in fluorescent shirts sometimes and that makes me uncomfortable. There."

He has also - to his wonderment - become a voiceover whiz. Listen for him in those Samsung ads that deride iPhone users as "Wall Huggers," as well as in their commercials featuring LeBron James.

That made his first face-to-face encounter with LeBron, the day before this interview, rather odd. Brennan had visited the set of Trainwreck, which Judd Apatow is directing from a Schumer script. In the comedy, LeBron plays Bill Hader's best friend.

"I couldn't remember if I had ever met LeBron. It's hard when you see a guy on TV so much," he says. "I feel like I know him because in the commercials I know him.

"I watched Bill and LeBron film a scene with [sportscaster] Marv Albert," he says. "Marv kept messing up his lines so bad that Hader and LeBron laughed for 10 minutes straight. LeBron was laughing so hard he started crying."

Hmm, where would that story land on The Approval Matrix board? We're guessing "Brilliant."

The Approval Matrix

11 p.m. Monday on Sundance TVEndText