I'd guess that most people under 30 who know of Charles Nelson Reilly at all remember him as played by a leisure-suited, compulsively spectacle-tweaking Alec Baldwin on an SNL "Inside the Actors Studio" skit. The joke, as always, was that Will Ferrell's James Lipton was prostrating himself before a trashy, basically negligible career, one that, in this case, will largely be remembered on the strength of Match Game appearances, sharing Friars Club roast panels with Foster Brooks, and generally providing a reliable source of nudge-nudge feyness and snark when Paul Lynde was otherwise occupied (actual "Hollywood Squares" exchange—Peter Marshall: "Oh, Paul, what would we ever do without you?" Lynde: [acidly] "Replace me with Charles Nelson Reilly").

That said, it's one of the winning eccentricities of The Life of Reilly, a taped distillation of C.N.R.'s autobiographical one-man-show, that it--feigned modesty aside--takes for granted that its subject's accomplishments are worthy of our attention and esteem. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of The Life of Reilly.