The new Web series “Lonely and Horny,” with episodes running between eight and ten minutes, tells the story of a would-be pickup artist named Ruby, played by the series co-creator Amir Blumenfeld.

In a recent essay for the Times, the critic James Poniewozik observes that individual episodes of many so-called prestige television shows are getting longer. Thanks to the diversity of platforms on which they appear, dramas, which formerly topped out at around a network-mandated forty-eight minutes or so per episode, are now often an hour-plus; comedies, once twenty-two minutes, now frequently run to a full half hour, and sometimes as long as forty minutes. “Even as viewers’ time becomes more precious, individual episodes are bloating,” he writes. “Television has come down with a case of gigantism." Poniewozik diagnoses a condition, but doesn’t entirely convince about its insidiousness. No one watches as many original scripted shows as a full-time TV critic, and so Poniewozik’s good-natured complaint may be partly a professional lament. (Having written about Netflix’s brutalizing “House of Cards” over the years, I can relate to his anecdote of starting an episode and immediately checking its running time, then grimacing if it’s going to run long.) But I have to think that most fans of “The Walking Dead,” “Better Call Saul,” “Fargo,” or even “House of Cards” would generally prefer having more time with the characters they enjoy, narrative tautness be damned, and likely feel that the credits, whenever they finally run, have come too soon. This past Sunday, my wife, having waited months for the première of the sixth season of “Game of Thrones,” asked, “That’s it?” when the first episode ended, after the standard fifty minutes.

Poniewozik’s argument is more persuasive, however, when it comes to comedy—or, at least, a certain kind of comedy. Specifically, he writes that the first season of Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which was originally produced for network television, was, at twenty-two minutes an episode, densely funny—“packed like a diamond”—while its recently released second season, produced free of network constraints, and with episodes that stretch to half an hour, has slightly less focus and energy. “Kimmy Schmidt,” which was created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, is an example of joke-delivery comedy, what we might call the sketch sitcom—the kind of show that aims to string viewers along in a breathless and nearly uninterrupted series of laughs, and that, because actual life is never so reliably funny, has little interest in establishing realism or verisimilitude. “The Simpsons,” which is, notably, a cartoon, is the modern urtext of the genre; other examples range from “Seinfeld” to “30 Rock,” another series created by Fey, to “Broad City.” (These are different from character-based sitcoms, such as “Friends” or “The Big Bang Theory”; or from character-based “dramedies,” like “Louie”; or from straight sketch shows, like “Portlandia,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” or “Key & Peele.”)

Sketch sitcoms may differ from one another slightly in style, but they are all basically long-form versions of sketch comedy, a genre that works best when it works fast. (Fey was, for many years, the head writer on “Saturday Night Live,” a show that has often had its best sketches revisited to death or blown out into dreadful full-length movies.) The giddy humor of these shows comes from their over-fullness, the feeling that each word and image that makes it on the air was chosen over many others that weren’t quite as funny, and so were left out. The best jokes often fly by as one-off lines or gags that seem to have been wedged into whatever spare cracks were letting the light through. The characters on these shows may be memorable, and may with time even rise to beloved status, but they aren’t people: they exist only to be funny, like comedy machines. (Picture Kramer or Jack Donaghy being powered-down when the lights are off.) Sketch sitcoms get their energy from the pressures of constraint. Twenty-two minutes may be, at this point, a mostly random number, but, as a fixed time limit that lingers in the back of our minds as we watch, it is a necessary ticking clock against which the jokes must race and the characters rage.

If short sketch sitcoms are good, are shorter ones even better? I was thinking of Poniewozik’s essay as I watched the first six episodes of a new Web series on Vimeo with the nicely succinct title “Lonely and Horny,” about a mostly despicable man named Ruby Jade, played by the series co-creator Amir Blumenfeld, who is indeed lonely and horny. Each episode runs between eight and ten minutes, and, within that span, tells a small story about Ruby’s increasingly desperate, and aggressively pathetic, attempts to score with women. Ruby is enrolled in a “The Game”-style pickup-artist course taught by Josh (played by the series co-creator and director Jake Hurwitz), an easygoing teacher whom Ruby insists on calling Master, but who appears to find his own class despicable. (Ruby calls the women he meets on dating apps “targets” and “marks”; Josh asks him to stop.) Instead, it is Ruby who is the delusional true believer.

Most of the episodes feature Ruby on a date with a woman who is too good for him and knows it, and which ends in well-deserved rejection and humiliation. Those dates are intercut with scenes of Ruby in class, recasting his failures as outrages perpetuated upon him by an unjust romantic universe. In the first episode, a blind date at a bar quickly turns bad after Ruby insults the handsome bar manager, repeatedly calling him a waitress, while bragging about his own six-figure salary. The woman he’s with, repulsed, ends up making out with the other guy. In a different scenario, a date emerges from the bathroom, pretending she has to leave to tend to her friend who’s having an emergency. “I must be bad luck,” Ruby says. “Something always happens to my date’s friends.” Before she goes, he makes her pay for her drink, and then takes her twenty when she doesn’t have change.

We get hints of Ruby’s life—we see him walking sadly around his beautiful but coldly modern and empty house, or swimming alone in his pool. Yet the show never encourages us to feel sorry for him, despite the fact that Blumenfeld, even while playing an asshole, is a natural charmer. How could you root for someone who says things like “I kiss and blog,” or begins conversations by telling women, “My mom’s dad had a full head of hair until the day he died”?

The real spark on the show isn’t between Ruby and his unlucky marks but between him and Josh. It’s a relationship that Hurwitz and Blumenfeld have cultivated as comedy partners for years, beginning in 2007, when they released the first of what would turn out to be more than seven hundred short comedy videos under the title “Jake and Amir” on the Web site College Humor. The site is known for its undergrad bro humor, but the bond between Jake and Amir was less of a bromance than an old-fashioned romance. On the series, Hurwitz and Blumenfeld played exaggerated versions of themselves, something they continue on “Lonely and Horny,” with Blumenfeld saying and doing inscrutable and disgusting things, while Hurwitz responds with an exasperation that, in large part because he can’t quite hide his amusement, verges on love.

The funniest, and perhaps most representative, thing that the two have ever done together remains an episode called “Reddit,” from 2012, which clocks in at under three and a half minutes. In it, Jake calls Amir out for his weirdly obsessive and self-hating behavior on the online community, while Amir responds with a string of whining nonsense. It builds to a joke in which Amir promises to “go dickless for Michael Chiklis,” referring to "The Shield" actor, a surreal non sequitur that makes no sense, but that, dozens of views later, still makes me laugh. (Chiklis himself later tweeted about his own confusion and amusement at the phrase.) The rapid-fire repeated phrases and exasperated looks, along with several of the in-jokes and recurring preoccupations, that mark the best episodes of “Jake and Amir” have been exported to the longer-form space of “Lonely and Horny.” Yet, while the new show looks great, has an excellent soundtrack by the band Lucius, and is frequently very funny, it lacks the comedic density of their best short sketches.