‘Free Bert’ Review: Bert Kreischer Strips Away the Shirtless Party Boy Persona, but Also the Laughs, in New Netflix Comedy

Friends and longtime podcasting partners Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer took opposing approaches to their recent Netflix comedy series.

Segura used his opportunity to deliver 2025’s Bad Thoughts, a vignette-driven sketch show in the vein of I Think You Should Leave that steered into everything that is amiably off-putting and in-your-face about Segura’s stand-up/podcast persona. It isn’t autobiographical, but it’s a snapshot of a disturbed — meant, as I’m sure it would be taken, as a compliment — brain. Bad Thoughts might be a show primarily for established Tom Segura fans, but man if you’re a Tom Segura fan, it’s on-brand.

On the surface, it appears that Kreischer’s new Netflix half-hour, Free Bert, aspires to something more like what Dave did for Dave “Lil Dicky” Burd or Bupkis did for Pete Davidson (or, I suppose, what Showtime’s Dice tried doing for Andrew Dice Clay), wherein it takes a comic with a specific and established persona and says, “What if we showed you the human behind the schtick? What if there’s a real person who is simultaneously more relatable and, perhaps, funnier without the artifice?”

Or perhaps what Kreischer is doing with Free Bert is almost a parody of that genre of comic-centered storytelling, taking a semi-autobiographical approach to revealing that Bert Kreischer is his schtick and his schtick is Bert Kreischer, and screw anybody who doesn’t get that.

It’s hard to tell for sure, because although Free Bert is successful on some level, telling a neatly arced story over six half-hour episodes that resolve in a way I found strangely satisfying (still setting up a possible season two), it’s not especially funny.

And when Free Bert is funny, it’s actually funny because of three teenage girls who are Kreischer’s co-stars — which is fairly generous of Kreischer as a co-creator, but may not deliver what his fans are hoping for or open the door to a new fanbase.

Kreischer co-created Free Bert with Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel, who mined somewhat similar “Real person behind the facade” territory with the barely remembered 2019 Netflix comedy Huge in France (and slightly more tangential fame terrain with Fox’s very short-lived The Grinder).

The series begins with Kreischer performing at Rob Lowe’s birthday party. Lowe professes to be Kreischer’s biggest fan, but he’s actually a fan of Kreischer’s most familiar gimmick, which involves proudly removing his shirt and performing his material topless. After a set during which Lowe urges Kreischer to tear off his shirt more than a dozen times, the Unstable star offers him some wisdom.

“What if you cut all the other stuff way down?” Lowe asks. He’s referring to the jokes in Kreischer’s routine.

Kreischer is still pondering the implications of Lowe’s suggestion when he returns home to where his wife LeeAnn (Arden Myrin, while the real-life LeeAnn is an executive producer on the show) is preparing their daughters Georgia (Ava Ryan) and Ila (Lilou Lang) for their first day at a prestigious new middle school. There’s wariness because previous schools haven’t worked out, in large part because of Bert’s antics. Georgia has struggles making friends and Ila has an unspecified learning disability (the real Ila has dyslexia, but it isn’t specified here).

LeeAnn wants Bert to go along to get along, tamping down his more brazen instincts. Georgia, easily embarrassed, wants him to disappear. Ila wants her father to be himself, which is the advice he follows, until that advice leads the entire family to the brink of being kicked out of the new school thanks to a kerfuffle Bert starts with middle school queen bee Kiersten (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) and her insufferable parents (Chris Witaske’s Landon and Mandell Maughan’s Chanel).

Forced to choose between being himself and protecting his family, Bert decides to change and in no time, he’s become buddies with Landon and two other key members of the school’s board, while Georgia has stolen Kiersten’s boyfriend (Braxton Alexander) and found some popularity.

It seems that an important lesson has been learned, much to the chagrin of Ila, who can’t respect her newly shirted father.

But who is Bert Kreischer when he wears a shirt, and is that a Bert Kreischer that Bert Kreischer wants to be?

The series, written and directed in its entirety by Paul and Mogel, makes a convincing case that when he isn’t going to comic extremes as a stand-up performer, Kreischer is a reasonably good actor, or at least an actor with a lot of built-in intensity and general screen presence. You could easily imagine him playing, say, a somewhat obnoxious stock broker living next door to Jon Hamm on Your Friends and Neighbors or a father who makes the other kids uncomfortable on Euphoria.

As Bert tamps down the attributes that have made him reasonably successful, Kreischer internalizes his fictional alter ego’s discomfort in ways that don’t feel sitcom-y at all. If the series is about the discovery that down-to-earth Bert Kreischer actually has very little personality or comedic voice, that’s a fine realization in symbolic terms, but a questionable bit of dramatic character development.

Bert, the character, may be domesticated, but Kreischer’s sensibility overflows into the show’s main storyline, which involves a 13-year-old boy in need of scrotal reconstruction surgery and lots and lots of discussion of whether or not a teenage girl will or will not be able to give him a handjob, which relates to what Bert refers to as his “world-class pedophile powers.” Audiences intrigued by the understated new side of Kreischer will probably experience several waves of ickiness relating to that plot, and those wishing to see Bert Kreischer being Bert Kreischer will probably be a bit bored with what he generally does in the show, which is experience repressed exasperation at various other people being uncouth when he cannot.

Kreischer’s general stage persona has always been disreputable, but good at heart. He’s a non-ideological comic, but he and the characters in the show really love the opportunity to say “retard,” so I guess he’s non-political but fully ideological, which is to say that he’s only willing to go so far to make everybody like him or to cross over to a wider audience. The series is generally populated by characters so unlikably disreputable that we’re supposed to recognize that only an un-neutered Bert can stop them, so most of the first season is spent waiting patiently. But not laughing.

The occasional laughs come particularly from Lang, whose Ila is presented as very much her father’s daughter, leading to dialogue with much more swearing that most preteen girls are afforded. The punchlines that Bert doesn’t get, Lang is given and generally nails. Reid-Gantzert gives Kiersten a mean-girl energy that I found more interesting than any of the noxious traits given to her parents (Witaske and Maughan are amusing, but one-note), while Ryan is especially good in the finale.

The finale is the only episode of Free Bert that I really liked, even if I snort-laughed a few times at earlier episodes. Nothing that happens in the finale is surprising, but the way it gets to a point that was always inevitable feels more earned than I might have guessed earlier. It’s a satisfying conclusion to a show that’s generally less satisfying in splitting the difference between giving Bert Kreischer devotees what they want — 2023’s The Machine is a much more accommodating bit of fan service — and showing them new depths beyond the shirtless party-boy image.

Free Bert proves there’s more to Bert Kreischer. I’m just not sure this is the best vehicle for it.