Life & Beth

Filled with memorable and authentic supporting performances. ... “Life & Beth” is arguably the best vehicle yet to serve Schumer’s talents.

If Amy Schumer does harbor ambitions as a serious actor, though, Life & Beth features her most compelling and complex onscreen performance to date. She gets many of the show’s biggest laughs, but just as often she’s the straight man to the supporting cast’s various oddballs.

Life & Beth isn’t as funny as previous Schumer projects (nor is it trying to be), but I found the adolescent flashbacks particularly enriching to this narrative.

It’s those little, often subtle gags, that keep the audience from sinking into Beth’s depression along with her. That effort to alleviate some of the heaviness helps us go along on the journey Beth is going to take without making her seem like she doesn’t appreciate what she has.

The ambitious “Life & Beth” has flaws, not just with its early tonal zig-zags but also with length. Like too many shows these days, it could easily have been two episodes shorter, and thus tighter. But it’s nonetheless an impressive and enjoyable series that’s about the perils of letting fear guide us, the need to heal, and the choice to enjoy life in the face of death.

It’s frequently very funny, full of bright comic turns, and often quite moving, even beautiful, sometimes just for the space of a shot, in a way that might make you reconsider a character. It’s sentimental in the end, but that is what sometimes happens when artists grow happy in their life.

The series may make some tonal missteps, and it certainly takes a few episodes for Life & Beth to find its footing, but the overall emotional depth and stellar performances make the comedy-drama worth a watch.

“Life & Beth,” at its best, represents an alternative to those genres, suggesting a rich and complicated vision of what it means to be a grown-up.

Life & Beth is a lot more than a smartly scripted rom-com. ... Watching it unfold, you wish Schumer either decided to focus more on the budding romance with the weird and weirdly likable John—it’s a charmingly offbeat relationship—or cut the series down to, say, seven episodes, like HBO’s recent coming-back-home comedy Somebody Somewhere.

It takes too long for “Life & Beth” to nudge its lead into the next phase of her life that actually drives the show. Once it does, though, that second act makes the show click right into gear.

Life & Beth is, like its heroine, imperfect. But if it occasionally trips over its own ambitions, it also demonstrates that whatever Amy Schumer wants to try next — as an actor and/or a creator — she has the varied and impressive skills to make it work.

“Life & Beth” is clearly a very personal story for Schumer, but by shifting between workplace comedy, rom-com, and late-coming-of-age dramedy, it never quite focuses on how it wants to be what it wants to be. Despite its unfocused format, it is compulsively watchable and there is an offbeat charm to the whole thing that is hard to resist.

While the middle episodes slump, "Life & Beth" starts strong, ends strong, and features a lead with genuine dramatic chops.

Feels like a return. It’s not a triumphant one, but it has touches of the old Schumer, smart and transgressive and self-aware. They’re stretched out a little too thinly over the 10 half-hour episodes, and they don’t really compensate for the overall sentimentality and simplistic psychology. But for the true fan, they’ll be worth the relatively short binge.

Overall, “Life & Beth” is a mixed bag but ultimately watchable first season.

It’s neither as hilarious nor as moving as it seems like it could be, and the tonal shifts between “dram” and “edy” can be jarring. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing for the rawness that Schumer — who not only stars but created the series and wrote and directed most of its episodes inspired by her own experiences — brings to the table.

What’s missing, here, is a unifying sensibility. The inconsistencies are glaring. Life & Beth’s tone lurches from realistic to absurd and back; relatively normal characters suddenly devolve into off-the-wall caricatures. ... The pieces just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.