When asked by an interviewer whether he felt a bit panicked about how his new movie The Bubble was so rooted in the early floundering attempts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore might seem obsolete by the time it premiered on Netflix, writer-director Judd Apatow answered:

I think I thought about it the entire time and still do. Do people need a comedy about this? What would be the purpose of that comedy? I chose to write about isolation and how the world tries to keep moving forward even though everything has changed. . . .  I wanted to explore what happens when you take a pause and think about your life.

Perhaps it’s the self-seriousness of this answer that provides a clue as to why The Bubble is such a slog. You’ll have to look hard to find a comedy as long and as leaden as this one. Apatow’s sense that he’s performing a solemn public service may account for the numbing pace of the film, which undermines every effort of the more talented members of the cast to generate laughs.