I’m not exactly sure why, but we’re currently experiencing a smattering of sitcoms about people left behind by fame. YouTube Premium recently launched Adam Pally’s new show Champaign Ill, about a rap entourage forced back to normality after the sudden death of their meal ticket. And now Comedy Central has The Other Two, about a pair of siblings struggling to cope with the fact that their 13-year-old brother has become a Bieber-sized pop sensation.

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Both shows are terrific. However, The Other Two has the potential to be something very special indeed. After two episodes, I was fully ready to sack off the rest of the day and plough through the entire series, and the fact that my preview credentials didn’t allow for that physically stung.

Written by former Saturday Night Live head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, whose departure in 2017 coincided with a noticeable downturn in quality, The Other Two is funny and scathing and touching in equal measure, and just perfectly observed. It’s a show about the ugly ravages of celebrity as observed from the sidelines, and you suspect that this is something the writers know a lot about. Working on a show like SNL, which is essentially an office job routinely interrupted by outsized celebrity egos, seems to have drilled a very specific point of view into them, and this is their chance to let it out.

I would even venture further and guess that this is a series about a Bieber analogue because of Kelly and Schneider’s firsthand experience with Bieber himself; after all, Bill Hader named him as the worst-behaved host thanks to a 2013 stint under Schneider and Kelly’s watch. Although, that said, this is not a show about the idiocy of precocious heartthrobs.

Because The Other Two is too smart for that. In fact, it occasionally goes out of its way to show that the character is just a normal 13-year-old boy trapped in the headlights. Instead, the series goes after his adult supervisors, and it goes after them hard. His manager (Scooter Braun in all but name, played by Ken Marino) is a Colonel Parker-level monster; a middle-aged man with badly dyed hair who works his charge to the bone, bandaging up his Adam’s apple and dying his tongue pinker for better market appeal. His mother (a slightly more human Dina Lohan, played by Molly Shannon), is an ugly fame-hogging leech who clearly sees her young son #ChaseDreams as her last chance after the disappointments of her two older two children.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Molly Shannon and Case Walker in The Other Two. Photograph: Jon Pack

Which brings us to the other two of the show’s title. Drew Tarver plays Carey, an actor first seen auditioning for the role of Man At Party Who Smells Fart; while Heléne Yorke plays his sister, a directionless former dancer gripped by a sudden desire to follow her passion – seeing 50 penises in the space of a single summer. These are the characters who the series hangs itself on, and they’re beautifully pitched; desperate because their brother’s fame has made them hopelessly aware of their own failings, but neutral enough to observe the manic world of celebrity with bemused detachment.

Comedy podcast veteran Tarver is the closest thing the series has to a central figure, holding roughly the same role as Jason Bateman in Arrested Development, if Jason Bateman had ever furiously masturbated to pictures of his roommate. Yorke gets a longer leash, allowing her to play bigger, and she very clearly relishes every second of it. My feeling is that she’ll be the breakout star of The Other Two. One scene in the second episode, where her character accidentally has an adult conversation with an 11-year-old girl, is particularly inspired. I can’t wait to see what else she has in the bag for the rest of the series.

I can’t wait to see the rest of the series in general, in fact. The first two episodes of The Other Two absolutely drip with potential. This one could be huge.