This week, The Comedians has finally figured out what kind of relationship Billy Crystal might have with a guy like Josh Gad: The kind that allows for a midday disc gun battle in FX studio’s hallways. Isn’t this how we should have been from the start, fellas? If The Comedians starred two pricklier comic entities then shaping the show around their petty squabbling and gross egotism would have made perfect sense. If you want feel-bad comedy, there’s always Louie or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Maybe the real life Gad and Crystal are, in fact, petty and gross, but they’ve both built their brands on various flavors of likeability.
“Orange You the New Black Guy” gets that better than any episode in the series to date. Watching Crystal and Gad horse around is surprisingly fun, though talking about it this much implies the scene has greater importance than it actually does. As far as the camaraderie between the leads is concerned, it’s a meaningful beat. As far as the actual story goes, it’s kind of a blip on the radar (though there is a certain smirking humor to how quickly they go from being purpose-driven to oblivious). This outing has almost nothing to do with the supporting cast outside of Stephnie Weir, but that’s fine: The onus is on Billy and Josh, who become keenly aware of their show’s prevailing whiteness following a cold open on-set interview with Elvis Mitchell. “The Billy and Josh Show” is a white production. Stars? White. Sound guys? White. Writers? White, except for that Asian guy, who Josh describes as “off-white.”
Someone out there will probably find that throwaway line offensive, but The Comedians is actively trying to offend. Scratch that, start again: It’s trying to point out what we should be offensive to us. Everyone is sensitive to Hollywood’s race gap, and they’re growing more sensitive to it by the day. “Orange You the New Black Guy” tackles that in a number of ways, including meta commentary during that Mitchell segment, where Mitchell pegs comedy as a tool for confronting social issues. Crystal’s reply ducks the point with brilliant cowardice—it’s hard to be timely when you’re shooting two months before air, but what does that really have to do with addressing contemporary cultural hot potatoes?
Pusillanimity is the name of the game, here. Billy and Josh want their product to be fully representative, and they express this sentiment in the well-meaning way most whites do when they’re too self-conscious to actually talk about race. The writing is sympathetic to them to an extent. At times, there’s a sense that the script is just referring back to The Comedians itself. There are two black people in this outing, Mitchell and guest star Affion Crockett, who plays Ron, the new diversity hire at “The Billy and Josh Show.” The initial reaction to Ron’s arrival is back-patting: Yay! We brought a minority onto our staff! Mission accomplished, everyone! Beyond that, though, no one knows how to treat him. Mitch bristles, first when Billy and Josh have Ron pitch a sketch directly to them, and later when he finds out that Ron makes more money than he does. Kristen, meanwhile, goes berserk trying to find money in the budget for Ron’s salary. (Weir is proving to be one of The Comedians’ most reliable elements. Her freak-outs and her conference call failures never fail to amuse.)
“Orange You the New Black Guy” makes a meal of Billy’s and Josh’s casual, anxious bigotry. You don’t need to be a Klan member to have prejudices, after all, and while our two heroes aren’t ill-intentioned by any stretch of the means, they are woefully misguided and they clearly have no idea how to talk to black people. (Hint: Try talking to them like, you know, people.) They do get one thing right: If you want to solve the diversity problem in the entertainment industry, it’s just as important to have diversity behind the camera as well as in front of it, and perhaps even more so. Twenty minutes doesn’t feel like enough time to pick the bones of institutional discrimination clean, but The Comedians does a surprisingly good job at it while maintaining an edge of uncomfortable hilarity.
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing online about film since 2009, and has been scribbling for Paste Magazine since 2013. He also contributes to Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and Badass Digest. You can follow him on Twitter. He is composed of roughly 65% Vermont craft brews.