Nobodies

Clever, snarky, and filled with "comedy mined from tragedy" setups, the series is a worthy entry into the "comics playing themselves" mini-genre. Unlike Louis CK or Jerry Seinfeld, Rachel, Hugh, and Larry are by no means at the top of their game, or even in the game, a fact that's made painfully clear by the show's opening scene in which the friends show up to perform at an improv show with more famous colleagues. Excited to see the show's poster along with stars like Maya Rudolph and Nat Faxon, they're quickly deflated when they see their own names weren't even included. No matter. It's just one humiliation in a string of many: producers who don't even bother to learn their names during a pitch meeting, admitting the embarassing title of the TV show they work on to a room full of more successful comics, a pickup basketball game that at first seems like a golden opportunity to give their script to a famous actor but ends in disaster.

It sounds like a drag to watch losers struggle, but the knowing, ironic writing and gags are top-shelf. Desperate to impress a producer at a pitch meeting, the three agree beforehand that they'll name-check their famous friends in a casual way, just to let the producer know that these are people to be reckoned with. Of course, this winds up in Larry immediately bringing up Melissa McCarthy (who produces Nobodies along with her husband, Ben Falcone), and Rachel explaining that they were in McCarthy's wedding, and knew Kristen Wiig "before she was Kristen Wiig." To quote Mel Brooks on the difference between laughs and pathos: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." Rachel, Hugh, and Larry keep climbing out of the sewer, only to fall back in -- and it's funny every single time.