Fame ruins lives. Maybe more importantly, it ruins TV shows.

Jersey Shore is a perfect case study. The reality series' first season was delightful, a fascinating ethnography about lovable idiots living their lovably idiotic lives in blissful ignorance of how ridiculous they were.

The show was an instant watercooler hit, transforming its cast of meatheads and guidettes into superstars overnight. Which meant that when it came time to film Season 2, everyone was in on the joke.

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They knew we wanted fighting and yelling and dumb Jersey jargon -- so that's what they gave us, loudly and often, in a calculated way that was the antithesis of the original's beautifully dumb authenticity. What's more, the series tried to follow the same template it always had without ever acknowledging its cast's phenomenal fame -- which only made the result seem phonier. (See also: The Hills continuing to show its cast members at "work," when everyone knew their real job was appearing on The Hills.)

Amy Schumer, of course, isn't a reality star. But going into the fourth season of her Comedy Central series Inside Amy Schumer, she faces a quandary similar to the one that once plagued Jersey Shore.

Amy's first 30 episodes covered a lot of ground, from meth labs to elaborate 12 Angry Men parodies. As a general rule, though, the show's been at its best when presenting sharply feminist (and hilarious) sketches that cast its star as an everywoman stand-in for her audience -- young, female, self-deprecating, struggling to get by in a culture that often seems hopelessly stacked against them.

It's a perspective that worked beautifully -- until it made Schumer herself so popular that she could hardly claim to represent it anymore. In 2015 alone, she appeared in her first feature film, the $110 million grossing Trainwreck (which she also wrote); won a Peabody, an Emmy and a spot on the Time 100; posed nude for Annie Leibovitz; hosted the MTV Movie Awards; and danced on a piano with Jennifer Lawrence onstage at a Billy Joel concert.

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Now Schumer is bigger than ever before -- and farther than ever from being an everywoman.

But to her credit, she doesn't pretend otherwise on Inside Amy Schumer this year. The new season's advertising campaign is a playful wink at Schumer's ubiquity; in promos and print ads, she's billed as being "overexposed." Its premiere -- which airs Thursday on Comedy Central -- casts Amy as "The World's Most Interesting Woman in the World;" a Dos Equis parody, yes, but also a sly jab at Schumer's elevated status. The show's old "man on the street" bits have been replaced by brief interviews with other comedians conducted at what looks like an exclusive party -- probably because these days, anyone approached on the street by Amy Schumer would find it tough to say anything beyond, "holy sh*t, you're Amy Schumer!"

The interstitial standup segments that appear on the show itself used to cover standard topics like sex and dating. Now they're about slightly less relatable things, like... posing nude for Annie Leibovitz.

Credit: Comedy Central

At one point in one of those segments, she jokes about her appearance -- then quickly interjects, "Don't feel bad for me. You know I'm very rich now, right?"

It's refreshing, honestly, to see a famous person publicly refuse to pretend that she isn't famous. Admirable as it is, though, that frankness doesn't always translate to sharp comedy.

There's nothing in the season's first two episodes as audacious and ambitious as last season's "Last F*ckable Day" (which came in Season 3's first episode) or "Girl, You Don't Need Makeup" (episode 2).

Instead, this year's openers are more of a hit-or-miss mish-mosh; an old-fashioned Amy sketch that casts a normal couple as athletes engaged in a high-stakes game of "not fooling around chicken," an amusing but obvious critique of roles women play in Oscar bait movies (surprise: they're always sad wives!), a bit that literally puts congressmen in a women's health clinic, making a point that Schumer and contemporaries like Samantha Bee have made better and more pointedly before.

It's not clear if Season 4's relative mildness is a result of Schumer's split focus -- being as big as she is now means she's got a lot on her plate beyond the show -- or if its first two installments aren't representative of the season to come.

Either way, though, Amy still packs in plenty of solid laughs, especially when it's in its feminist wheelhouse (as in a sketch from episode 2 about "guy-gles," goggles that allow women to see "the kind of woman the guy in front of you needs you to be"). And if it doesn't seem quite as revolutionary this go around? Well, that's only natural for any aging comedy series -- overexposed star or not.

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