The Comedians

The joy here is watching Crystal and Gad play off each other. Their scenes together are a hoot, with each having no problem lampooning the other, or themselves, for that matter.

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

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

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.

One wonders how close satire is to truth here, as this unlikely pair slogs through backstage conflict with little apparent help from director and exec-producer Larry Charles.