In the first episode of Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here,” we meet Eddie (Michael Angarano) and Ron (Clark Duke), two comedians from Boston who’ve come to Los Angeles in 1973 to seek their fortune. When they introduce themselves to their taxi driver, he scoffs.
Johnny Carson moved “The Tonight Show” from New York the year before. Since then, the driver says, “every smart aleck who thinks he can tell a joke has been circling Burbank like a vulture.” (I’m paraphrasing; like his passengers, the cabby works blue.)
Watching TV in the 2010s is like riding in that cab: Every time you stop, it seems, another comic is climbing in the back seat to tell you the story of his or her life. “Dying” is not even the only series this summer involving “The Tonight Show” in the 1970s. “There’s ... Johnny!,” whose creators include Paul Reiser, arrives on Seeso in August.
They say that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: The frog dies in the process. At this point, TV is dissecting so many comedians’ psyches that it risks killing the whole genre.
The route from open-mic night to prime time is well trod, as “I’m Dying Up Here” reminds us. It was in 1973 that the 19-year-old Freddie Prinze made a legendary Carson appearance — he got called to the couch, Johnny’s ultimate benediction — that would lead him to star in “Chico and the Man.”
Only occasionally, though, did comedians play comedians, and when they did, as on “Seinfeld,” the work was usually ancillary to the plot. Jerry’s stand-up punctuated the show, but his career just sort of happened in between rounds of diner philosophy and run-ins with Newman.
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” shifted that focus, with Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld,” living the life of Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld.” But it was Louis C.K.'s “Louie,” which debuted on FX in 2010, that truly kicked off open-mic night for comedians’ stories of comedians.
“Louie” is more than a show about the life of a comedian. It’s about life as experienced by someone who is a comedian: the grind of New York City, single parenting, dating, middle age, taking risks and failing.
But the context of it all is the hustle of comedy life for Louis C.K.'s alter ego, a comic who’s successful, albeit not quite as successful as the star. In one story line, he has a shot at taking David Letterman’s job but doesn’t get it; in another, he nurses jealousy after his frenemy, Marc Maron, lands a TV show.
In real life, it was Maron who got a TV show (“Maron”) after Louis C.K., also playing a version of himself as a comedian. So did, to name a few, Maria Bamford (“Lady Dynamite”), George Lopez (“Lopez”), Andrew Dice Clay (“Dice”), Jim Gaffigan (“The Jim Gaffigan Show”), John Mulaney (“Mulaney”) and Pete Holmes (“Crashing”). Like the Velvet Underground, “Louie” — now on indefinite hiatus — had only a cult following, but it seems to have inspired endless followers.
As with a lot of showbiz comedy, there’s an element of write-what-you-know insiderism here — gazing into one’s own belly laughs.
But stand-up comedy is also revealing of character in an intimate way. It’s both personal and gladiatorial. Comedians face an audience alone, with no co-stars, no collaborators. They are both material and author, performer and instrument. Even when their material isn’t autobiographical, it’s still personal — their worldview, their judgment — and it’s judged immediately: laugh or no laugh.
It’s no-risk, no-reward, which is why “Dice” and “Lopez,” with their generic focuses on the troubles of fame, are so forgettable. What makes a good story about comedy is what makes good comedy: a fresh take and distinctive material.
Bamford’s “Lady Dynamite” refracted her struggles with mental illness through a kaleidoscope of loopy surrealism. “Take My Wife,” on Seeso, explored Rhea Butcher and Cameron Esposito’s experience as married comics at different levels of success. Holmes’ “Crashing” homed in on Holmes’ background as a committed Christian in a blasphemous business.
These shows, in other words, knew their voice, or found it. And it’s a lack of original voice that sinks “I’m Dying Up Here,” a drama that takes the travails of comics all too seriously.
Created by Dave Flebotte and based on a nonfiction book by William Knoedelseder, “Dying” looks at comedy from the cheap seats. It follows an ensemble of thirsty young comics living on Rice-a-Roni and being groomed by Goldie (Melissa Leo), the no-bull owner of a comedy club, while dreaming of “Tonight.” (Carson, played by Dylan Baker, is one of several real-life comedy-world figures who figure in the series, “Boardwalk Empire” style.)
One of the group makes it to Johnny’s couch, then dies in an apparent suicide — and before the first episode ends with Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy,” you know you’re in for another tale of paying dues and showbiz blues. (The executive producers include Jim Carrey, who starred in the Andy Kaufman hagiography “Man on the Moon.”)
“Dying” is best in its small moments — comedians disarming hecklers and competitively busting chops, Goldie nudging her brood over who has a “tight 15” (a solid quarter-hour comedy routine). The series has a touch of golden-hued Cameron Crowe romanticism.
But it also suffers from the self-seriousness of Crowe’s recent “Roadies,” also for Showtime. It’s weighed down by melodrama and long-winded reflections on the price of fame. The cast is mostly able — Ari Graynor stands out as Cassie, a raunchy comic who fights against cute-blonde typecasting — but the show betrays an actor of Leo’s quality by making her sell lines like “Tomorrow’s all you got, and even that’s hangin’ by a thread.”
Ultimately, “Dying” is less a show-business story than a ham-handed period drama. Vietnam vets, Bobby Riggs versus Billie Jean King: By the time a character began a scene saying, “I’ve been watching these Watergate hearings, and ...,” I was ready to say, “Stop, I’ve heard this one before.”
A better period piece, Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” visits a different seminal time and place of comedy: 1958 in the downtown clubs of New York City, where stand-up and counterculture were merging through iconoclasts like Lenny Bruce. (The series, which has been picked up for two seasons, does not yet have a premiere date, but the pilot is streaming on Amazon.)
It’s not the story of a bad-boy rebel, but of Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a vivacious Upper West Side homemaker married to an aspiring comic. When he leaves her — claiming that married life is holding him back, though his only talent is for ripping off Bob Newhart routines — she finds herself onstage at the Gaslight Cafe, improvising a raunchy, fiery set that brings down the house (and gets her arrested on obscenity charges). Her ex has given her the best divorce settlement a budding comic can receive: material.
“Mrs. Maisel” is all voice, not surprising given that it comes from Amy Sherman-Palladino, of the dialogue-drunk “Gilmore Girls.” The pilot suffers from whimsy overload — it’s a bit “Wes Anderson does open-mic night.” But Brosnahan has real verve, and it’s a refreshing twist on a tired story — the frustrated male artist held back by domestic obligations — that “Dying,” in one of its many subplots, plays completely straight.
Does TV need another comedian’s story? It’s like asking if the world needs another “Aristocrats” joke. One lousy one is one too many. But if someone surprises you with a routine you thought you’ve seen a million times before, you’ll end up, despite yourself, asking them to tell you another.