We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Sean Baker is one of the most promising directors working today. After 2015’s shot-with-an-iPhone movie “Tangerine” took his career to another level, he found the humor in tragedy in “The Florida Project,” which elevated him further in Hollywood. But it was 2024’s “Anora” that made him a big name, as the movie became a hit for NEON and went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Long before that, though, he co-created a short-lived, strange sitcom starring Seth Green (“Austin Powers”) and Eugene Levy (“American Pie”).

The show in question is “Greg the Bunny,” which originally aired in sitcom form on Fox in 2002. It takes place in a world where 3.2 million puppets are living in the United States alongside humans. Wanting a job that doesn’t involve only working on Easter, the titular bunny finds a job on a kid’s show called “Sweetknuckle Junction.” Green plays his human pal Jimmy Bender, while Levy plays the show’s producer, Gil Bender, Jimmy’s father.

Baker co-created the show with his friends Spencer Chinoy and Dan Milano. This was at a time when Levy was in the midst of his run in the “American Pie” movies and Green was voicing Chris on “Family Guy.” (He was still a few years away from Adult Swim’s bizarrely titled show “Robot Chicken.”) Comedian Sarah Silverman was also part of the show’s cast, and it seemingly had a lot going for it.

Be that as it may, Fox cut its run very short; it only aired for one season. But the character of Greg the Bunny was born out of a public access show called “Junktape” that Baker, Chinoy, and Milano made earlier.

In 1998, IFC gave Greg the Bunny his own series of shorts entitled “The Greg the Bunny Show” on the network, which paved the way for the Fox show. In 2005, after the sitcom was canceled, IFC brought Greg back for a new series of shorts that often spoofed popular movies.

“It started with the three of us just fooling around in his apartment, not knowing where this was gonna go except for our weekly public access thing,” Baker said in a 2006 interview with Probot Animation. “We definitely have a big team around us, a great team that works with us.”

In that same interview, Baker explained that they had ambitions to make a “Greg the Bunny” movie, not unlike Joss Whedon’s “Serenity,” which gave “Firefly” one last flight on the big screen.

“There’s no deal yet, but we’d very much like to do that. I think it’s the next step […] I think it’s just appropriate for us to do it at this point, and I think we have the fanbase to make it a successful project.

That never materialized, but Baker added that “we all aspire to be filmmakers, making feature films,” and he eventually accomplished that dream some years later.

After 2021’s “Red Rocket,” Baker experienced his career peak as a filmmaker. In 2025, Baker tied an Oscars record set by Walt Disney: They’re the only two people to ever win four Oscars in a single night. Baker won Best Editing, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture for “Anora,” while Mikey Madison won Best Actress. It would have been impossible to predict any of that while watching this bizarre puppet show in the early 2000s.

You can grab “Greg the Bunny: The Complete Series” on DVD.