The Comedians: “Overhear/Partners”

And so ends the first season of The Comedians, not with a bang but with a two-episode blaze of uncertainty. “Overhear” and “Partners” combine with each other to make a double-edged blade. They showcase both the best and the worst of what the show has offered over the last couple of months: Billy and Josh get into it, have a conflict, and grow as characters more in a sub-hour, multi-part finale than they have throughout most of the series to date, and The Comedians suddenly feels like it has weight to go along with its meta navel-gazing and cringe gags. The problem, of course, is that the show has oscillated between following a throughline and meandering since its premiere, so the climax feels almost like anti-climax.
There’s nothing wrong, per se, with sitcoms that want to occasionally have self-contained episodes that wander down unbeaten paths. But The Comedians has stumbled in its hermetic moments, because they occur in a space where events that happened prior to their airing don’t matter. There’s no consistency. If The Billy and Josh Show has a tragically hip British auteur take over for one taping, that’s fine. If the action moves away from the studio and into L.A. to make an doleful and awkward celebration of Billy’s name day, that’s also fine. What is decidedly less fine is that these storylines unfold without making acknowledgement of what took place even a week ago. The Comedians’s Crystal heel has always been its failure to establish a rhythm from one outing to the next.
So “Overhear” and “Partners” succeed just by being about something meaningful, though it’s almost too little, too late, as the old bromide goes. Maybe wisely, the former installment leans on the “upstart punk” side of Josh, kicking off with a sequence in his dressing room where he’s cajoled by his asshole friends—Rory Scovel, Dan Gill and Kate Micucci—into smack-talking Billy. It’s a smart set-up; nobody in their right mind could buy Gad as the kind of person who would willfully deride his living legend co-star behind his back. (Or anybody. Try to imagine Gad trashing, say, a puppy out of earshot. It’s impossible.) It’s much easier to buy him as the kind of person who might be easily peer pressured into whispering and snickering about Billy as a relic of comedy’s past.