Once upon a time in the music business, it was normal for a band to put out two records a year. Then, as budgets went wild and groups wrote albums in the studio, they might‘ve started taking a year or two to deliver the next. Then, as schedules were filled with solo albums or touring or getting off the drugs they got on making that last record, it became customary for major artists to spend several years between releases, without anyone calling it a comeback or a reunion.
Likewise, in the olden days of television, series were not only prompt in delivering new seasons, but the seasons ran so long that the shows took only the summer off, spelled by reruns or “summer replacements.” They were hardly gone at all. In the new, short-run TV economy — and lately amplified by the pandemic — absence is usual. It’s true that one greets some slow-to-return series with the same surprise as finding out that a celebrity you had believed dead turns out to be living; but at other times, especially when a show lives large in your mind, you think, “Well, that’s just how long it takes.”
This week, two long-in-returning, and for some long-awaited, oddball comedies come back to television. It has been three and a half years since the last season of “Documentary Now!” (Wednesday, IFC) and six and a half since a new episode of “Inside Amy Schumer” (Thursday, Paramount+). Neither series could be called mainstream, though the former, created by Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers and director Rhys Thomas, attracts top talent, and the latter was the springboard for Schumer’s bigger-time career.
