Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show

"Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show" (2017) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Josh Greenbaum. It reconstructs The Dana Carvey Show — a 1996 ABC sketch comedy with Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Louis C.K., Charlie Kaufman and Robert Smigel all in the writers' room — that still crashed after a handful of episodes.

Every major name from that crew went on to do something canonical. That gap between the talent assembled and the result delivered is exactly what the film examines. Carvey, Carell, Bill Hader, and others sit for interviews, and the answers are funnier and stranger than you'd expect.

If you're interested in how comedy actually works — or why it spectacularly doesn't — this is a sharper 95 minutes than most TV retrospectives manage. Stream "Too Funny to Fail" online on iFILM.