Impressionist Frank Caliendo brings his schizophrenic shtick to TBS. By Joseph Guinto

John Madden is Frank Caliendo's "Free Bird." Unquestionably, Caliendo owes his current career success to the spot-on impression he does of Madden, the rumpled, heavyset, NFL Hall of Fame coach and NBC sportscaster. It was Caliendo's Madden that helped him land a weekly stint on Fox NFL Sunday and score steady appearances on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman, breaking away from the pack of no-name comedians on MadTV. The Madden impression is also what first got Caliendo noticed by TBS, which just debuted Frank TV, Caliendo's own sketch show. Audiences, too, clearly love the impression - it relies on weird, guttural noises, telestrations sans Telestrator, Brett Favre exaltations, and the word boom. But maybe they love it too much.

In the unaired pilot for Frank TV, one of the first impressions Caliendo does is of Madden. Pretending to circle himself on a Telestrator, Caliendo, as Madden, says, "Here's a guy who's a little bit tired of doing that voice every week."

That was just a joke, he later insists during an interview. Summoning the same Madden voice, Caliendo says, "Here's a guy who doesn't mind doing the Madden impression - boom!" Still, just as Lynyrd Skynyrd had other songs ("Sweet Home Alabama" wasn't bad), Caliendo does other impressions. A lot of them. And, yeah, he wouldn't mind if people asked for, say, an Al Pacino every now and again. "But that's really how TV goes," Caliendo says. "What you do in this business is you try to pigeonhole yourself so you can get known. And when you finally get known for something, you spend the rest of your career trying to convince people you can do other things. Hopefully, I can do that with this show."