Should You Pay The Cover For The Comedians?

What Is This Thing?

Billy Crystal thinks it's good news when he gets called in to the FX offices to talk about The Billy & Billy Show, a new sketch series in which he plays every comic role. Unfortunately, it's the opposite: the all-Crystal concept has tested poorly. Instead, FX President Denis Grant has a different idea: pairing Billy with up-and-coming multi-hyphenate Josh Gad. Presented with the choice of doing the show with Gad or not doing a show at all, Billy chooses the former...but it's not exactly a perfect match.

When Is It On?

Thursdays at 10 PM on FX.

Why Was It Made Now?

Louie -- the network's other single-camera sitcom in which a comedy star plays "himself" (R.I.P. Legit) -- is an award-minting machine. Also, Gad is so hot right now. As for Crystal...I guess someone thought they should give him a show before he dies? Or, like the Billy on the show, he's suddenly concerned about his relevance in the industry.

What's Its Pedigree?

In addition to Crystal and Gad in front of the camera, MadTV veteran Stephnie Weir plays Kristen, a high-strung producer on the show; sometime Hart Of Dixie guest star Megan Ferguson is Esme, Billy's assistant; and Steven Weber plays Jamie, a director and an old friend of Billy's. But the participant with the most prestige is writer-director Larry Charles, whose credits include Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Borat and who also plays himself in the pilot. Charles is also an Executive Producer along with Burn Notice creator Matt Nix and Community writer Ben Wexler; the three of them adapted the show from a Swedish series called Ulveson & Herngren, the producers of which are also attached here. Crystal is also credited for co-writing the pilot teleplay.

...And?

My impression of The Comedians has gone through several evolutions. When I first heard the premise and cast, I thought it was a "fake" FX show like Anger Management or the Kelsey Grammer/Martin Lawrence Partners -- something cheap, with a 100-episode order, that fills a slot but bears no resemblance to any of the network's other brands. When the promos started running, I could tell it was aiming to be something more ambitious, but more than likely failing.

Then I started watching the pilot...and I didn't really hate it. HEAR ME OUT.

I know that the "famous person plays comedically heightened version of himself" genre is increasingly crowded. I didn't think I had room in my heart for another one in addition to Curb Your Enthusiasm before Episodes wormed its way in. But in both those cases, I had some affection for the actual person playing himself as a dick (see also: Louie, before my problems with Season 4); The Comedians started from a deficit by casting one guy who hasn't been funny in about thirty years, and another one who keeps playing the same sweaty idiot over and over again. It's not a lot to hang your hat on.

So what kind of works is that Gad has already played so many loud, grubby losers -- in 1600 Penn, New Girl, Bored To Death, and The Book Of Mormon -- that he can't really play the same kind of dope here. He definitely plays the role clueless, self-involved, and slightly out-of-touch -- the way all the celebrities in this genre do -- but it was such a relief for me to see him acting like an adult and not a hyperactive nine-year-old that he made me laugh a couple of times. For instance, when Josh and Billy first go out for dinner after FX has put them together in this shotgun wedding of a TV project, talk of Mormon leads him to encourage Billy to try Broadway. Starting to frost over, Billy says he did, and tells him about 700 Sundays and its many accolades. Josh asks what it was about, and when Billy starts by saying, "It's sort of that my dad died when I was fifteen--" Josh starts laughing hysterically, and continues laughing for a while, long enough for it to stop being funny and then come back around. Or when Billy fires Larry Charles and Josh goes to Kristen to suggest a director he knows as a replacement, Billy pushes hard for his friend Jamie (who, it turns out, has a romantic history with Kristen), and behind his back, Josh accuses Billy of being "totally racist. Against women." As Billy's leaving his dressing room after an awkward exchange about Charles's surprise dismissal, Josh stops him with "I NEVER HAD A DAD....My mom just found some sperm somewhere. [whispering] I don't even know where."

Okay, looking at these lines written out, I realize they don't sound like much, but considering how giant most of his characters have been to this point, Gad has a real gift for underplaying a punchline. Then again, it's also possible that I like Gad and Josh because a lot of what's animating his character is loathing of Billy for his agedness. "It's a dance, the first time you meet someone. And like dancing, people over sixty are not great at it." Not enough shows stick it to old people, in my opinion.

...But?

Since they were making a show about a sketch show, the producers of The Comedians should have learned from their forebears and imitated 30 Rock, not Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip: showing us the sketches from the show within the show is a bad idea. If they're supposed to be funny, they're never going to be funny enough; if they're supposed to be dumb, then you're just watching a dumb sketch. There are a couple of points in the pilot where a sketch from The Billy & Josh Show is inserted between a couple of scenes of the actual show, with no context or commentary, and it just feels like an editing mistake.

The behind-the-scenes characters, also, feel very stock. We already had a dippy millennial female assistant on Episodes (and on 30 Rock, for that matter), so Esme is, so far, a not very interesting version of a type we already know well. Kristen's romantic misadventures -- a five-year on-and-off affair with Jamie when he was married -- also echo Episodes, this time in her similarity to that show's network executive Carol. Kristen is also styled like a network executive in silky blouses and pencil skirts, unlike every female TV producer I have ever known -- because they actually have to do things that require comfort and mobility -- which seems like it would have been a thing someone would have noticed if they'd...looked at any of the female producers who work on The Comedians.

And for all of Gad's charm, Crystal is just off-putting. The self-deprecating jokes at his own expense are toothless, and his crustiness toward Josh makes him unlikable -- not likable unlikable like Larry on Curb; just unlikable, like Paul Reiser in his short-lived "playing a version of himself" sitcom, or Chevy Chase at any point in his life. Okay, fine -- Crystal's not that bad, but only because no one is. He is bad, though.

AND YET, because I was enjoying the Josh character so much that I was starting to think the show might actually win me over despite all its other deficits...with two minutes left in the pilot episode, Steven Weber appears, as Jamie. Except this is the Jamie we've been shown, earlier in the episode, in an old photo from the '90s...

...and this is Jamie now.

HAW HAW, BILLY'S OLD BRO IS A LADY NOW. I mean, all credit to Steven Weber, who has been great for two decades but who, between Helix and Sleepy Hollow and that one How To Get Away With Murder and Chasing Life, is really having a Weberenaissance this TV season: I believe that he can give this character some degree of dignity even if the show does not...

...So?

...but the gross-out reaction both Billy and Josh have to the reveal of present-day Jamie -- muted only because they know they're being filmed for this "documentary" about their sketch show -- is so off-putting that I won't be around to find out how hard Weber fights against the show's overall tone. Transphobia's not a great note to end a pilot on, but then, I suppose it's the kind of cultural sensitivity one would expect in a show co-written by the guy in the "hilarious" "Oriental" t-shirt you see up top. Sorry, Gad: you're great, but it's a hard pass.