“Best friend Rob and Big” is a search about a real friendship, not a product: it points to Rob & Big, the MTV reality series that ran from November 2006 to April 2008 and followed professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek and his best friend and bodyguard, Christopher “Big Black” Boykin, through their daily lives together.
What the show actually was
Rob & Big wasn’t a competition or a scripted format. It was a fly-on-the-wall look at an unlikely pairing: a professional skateboarder living a young Hollywood life, and his much larger best friend and bodyguard, whose deadpan reactions to Rob’s antics became the show’s comedic engine. Across three seasons, the pair adopted a mini-horse named Simon, chased Guinness World Records on camera, and generally treated the cameras as an extension of a friendship that existed before the show did rather than a performance built for it.
The Guinness World Record stunts
Boykin’s competitive streak became a running bit on the series. He set two Guinness World Records on camera: fastest time to peel and eat three bananas, and fastest time to eat five powdered donuts. Neither record was the point — the point was Rob egging Big on and Big playing along, which is the dynamic the whole show ran on.
What happened after the show ended
Rob & Big ended in 2008, but the friendship and the on-screen chemistry didn’t. Boykin appeared as a regular on Dyrdek’s follow-up shows, Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory and later Ridiculousness, keeping the same big-brother, deadpan-reaction role that made him a fan favorite in the first place.
Christopher “Big Black” Boykin’s death
Boykin died of heart failure on May 9, 2017, at age 45. Dyrdek and the wider MTV reality-TV community spoke publicly about the loss, and clips and tributes from Rob & Big and Fantasy Factory continue to circulate as the record of a friendship that read as genuine on screen because it was genuine off it.
Where to watch it now
Rob & Big has moved around streaming services since its original 2006-2008 MTV run, as is typical for a show this old — check your current streaming provider’s search directly for the most up-to-date availability rather than relying on a guide that can go stale. Full episode listings and air dates are documented on Wikipedia’s List of Rob & Big episodes page if you want to track down a specific one.