The Comedians

The Comedians works and works until you’re ready to fall off your chair.

The combination of young and old proves lethally clever, making what felt like a strange pairing from the outset into a comedy duo for the ages. Everything with Crystal and Gad works at the most basic and extreme levels.

Though it has a ways to go before reaching the upper echelon of its subgenre, The Comedians’ likable cast compensates for its familiar premise.

The 13 episodes are fun, not groundbreaking, but slickly produced and accented with musical comedy. Like the two stars, the series is endearing, loud and desperate for attention, but ultimately a love letter to comedy and comedy history.

The Comedians is a decently prepared entree with just enough bursts of flavor.

Crystal is in fine form and Gad is appropriately irritating (and funnier than I expected). The Comedians is more of an acquired taste than a “must-see”--and will appeal to those who enjoy satire and winking, self-referential show-biz tropes.

Crystal being Crystal, Gad being Gad, you laugh enough. Sometimes. [10 Apr 2015, p.58]

Dotted with celebrity cameos, the customary exaggerated Hollywood insecurities and an underlying commentary on the generational divide, the show generates enough solid laughs to overcome its arid patches.

Mr. Gad is utterly seductive. Mr. Crystal’s endlessly changing facial expressions flow into one another, each containing its own little world of loathing, of mockery. They’re perfect. He’s perfect. All that he, Mr. Gad and this series need is more coherently themed comedy of the kind in the pilot, which they don’t quite have down yet in some subsequent episodes, as one talent-squandering revel in a supermarket shows.

As a team, they [Billy Crystal and Josh Gad] are better than the shows--both the real one and the fake one--they're in.

The Comedians boasts razor-sharp performances, but is ultimately toothless.

If you think you can tough it out, the The Comedians is worth a look, if only to have an opinion on--and if you stick with it, you may feel that your time hasn’t been wasted, and that perhaps The Comedians just needed time to figure itself out, not unlike the fictional series it’s chronicling. But man, does it test your patience.

Despite two versatile comic performers at the center, The Comedians comes across as the most cutting showbiz satire of 1991.

The fictional Crystal and Gad have zero chemistry as the series launches, which becomes a pivotal part of the plot as the series progresses. Unfortunately, their real-life counterparts portrayed this lack of comedic chemistry so well in the beginning that it not only impacted the development of show within the show “The Billy & Josh Show,” it was leaving a lukewarm first impression of The Comedians as well.

The show gets funnier--and so does the show within the show--but four episodes in, the whole setup still felt more like work than it probably should.

The anti-chemistry between Gad and Crystal, though played for laughs, doesn’t often result in them. Instead, my interest was held by the opportunity The Comedians provides to think about why there’s such a widening gap between Crystal’s kind of big-gestured, boisterous comedy style and Gad’s quieter comedy of sweaty desperation.

While The Comedians is OK, the overall effort feels a little too familiar.

While talent is crucial, talent alone is not enough. And there's only so much bad material, and so many bad choices, talent can surmount.

The Comedians is a strangely mixed bag, which works or doesn't work from moment to moment and from mode to mode.

So the Josh half of this show’s central joke grows a little tedious. In truth, so does the Billy half; he’s too resistant to too many things for scant reason. But Mr. Crystal and Mr. Gad play it gamely, and the proceedings are enlivened by an enjoyable collection of guest stars, like Steven Weber, Joe Torre and Mel Brooks.

When the second bananas nudge the top ones, The Comedians has laughs. When it leaves the two to play out a tired game of “The Sunshine Boys,” they vanish.

There’s no bite to anything in this show.... The sketches that Crystal and Gad perform in are all solid B-minus to C-plus. Their stop-and-start friendship is utterly unremarkable. Nobody seems willing to go anywhere remotely risky.

Crystal just seems too nice to be big-timing a guy like Gad, no matter how much Gad revels in his own ability to annoy.... The Comedians feels forced.

The best cringe comedies finely tune the balance between discomfort and laughs. The Comedians needs to work on its balancing act, because there is a lot more of the former than the latter, and that turns out to be no laughing matter.

The Comedians is shocking only in its lack of originality. [6-19 Apr 2015, p.14]

The show-within-the-show is bad, intentionally so (I think). The show itself is worse, if only because there’s more of it.

Whatever was supposed to be funny here very plainly isn’t.

Crystal and Gad are deeply unlikable as they bicker and complain about everything. And the supporting characters are woefully underwritten.