In the first episode of Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here,” we meet Eddie (Michael Angarano) and Ron (Clark Duke), two comedians from Boston who’ve come to Los Angeles in 1973 to seek their fortune. When they introduce themselves to their taxi driver, he scoffs.

Johnny Carson moved “The Tonight Show” from New York the year before. Since then, the driver says, “every smart aleck who thinks he can tell a joke has been circling Burbank like a vulture.” (I’m paraphrasing; like his passengers, the cabby works blue.)

Watching TV in the 2010s is like riding in that cab: Every time you stop, it seems, another comic is climbing in the back seat to tell you the story of his or her life. “Dying” is not even the only series this summer involving “The Tonight Show” in the 1970s. “There’s … Johnny!,” whose creators include Paul Reiser, arrives on Seeso in August.

They say that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: The frog dies in the process. At this point, TV is dissecting so many comedians’ psyches that it risks killing the whole genre.