‘Episodes” is high-quality and low-rated — but it’s the best sitcom you’re not watching.
This has a lot to do with the fact that the series — whose third season just started on Showtime — stars ex-“Friends” topliner Matt LeBlanc as himself.
It’s a selling point because the show is so good at using LeBlanc and his rep as a doofus, but also a curse: His presence effectively kills any chance of achieving hipness à la “Girls” or “Community.”
Not that a show created and written by alums of “Friends” (David Crane) and “Mad About You” (Jeffrey Klarik) could ever be a critical darling, mind you (too many TV snobs).
And yet “Episodes” is more reliably funny than most of the competition while swiftly and cleverly recombining old-fashioned narrative devices.
One of these is the fish-out-of-water plot. The general premise is that two married British writers, Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) have moved to LA to oversee the American remake of their successful series.
There’s culture shock aplenty, but the best twist is that the couple is simultaneously repelled and seduced by LA and American TV. They hate themselves for loving things like convertibles, walks on the beach and craft-service snacks.
But mostly Bev and Sean provide appalled eyes through which we watch the other side of “Episodes”: a workplace comedy about a network ruled by compromises, mediocrity and cheap stunts.
As if this weren’t enough, Crane and Klarik throw in sex-farce shenanigans as the characters spend an ungodly amount of time cheating, then frantically trying to cover their tracks — nobody here is overly smart or practical, including the smug Brits.
The biggest horndog is LeBlanc’s Matt LeBlanc — a fake-reality gambit familiar to fans of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” among others.
Here the star gives us a version of himself that’s both endearing and deluded, a good-hearted but narcissistic and dim-witted sex maniac with a giant physical endowment and a shrinking career. Even his former “Friends” shun him, and only the guy who played lateral character Gunther (James Michael Tyler) agrees to cameo on Matt’s new show.
“Episodes” weaves all these strands to great effect in the third season as Bev and Sean try to fix their marriage and get increasingly alienated from their own series.
Happily, the ousting of weasely network president Merc Lapidus (John Pankow) has also carved out more screen time for Kathleen Rose Perkins’ harried head of programming, Carol Rance.
Never one to miss an opportunity to abase herself, Carol sinks to new lows in her dealings with psycho new exec Castor Sotto (Chris Diamantopoulos, late of “24”). His speech — coming in a later episode — describing his vision for television’s future is insane, scary and genius all at once.
But at least Showtime, unlike the desperately stupid network on the series, has shown some brains by ordering a fourth season.
LeBlanc in ‘Episodes’ is the among the best sitcoms
