Ready for ‘Flight’

A bigger hit, in its small but world-spanning way, than I am sure anyone connected with the show expected it to be, “Flight of the Conchords” is finally back for a second season on HBO.

The series, which spent 2008 replenishing its tanks, tells the story of Bret (Bret McKenzie) and Jemaine (Jemaine Clement), a New Zealand folk-rock-pop-rap-soul duo seeking fame, or at least a paying gig, in the city of New York, New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere; but they can’t make it there, or anywhere.

Mixing the ironic whimsicality of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with the premise and structure of “The Monkees,” filtered through a downtown New York sensibility, “Conchords” was twice as delightful when it landed for being so completely unexpected and unpredictable. It ended its first season with a sort of cliffhanger -- which would have worked as well as an ending -- in which Bret and Jemaine split the band into two, each with a new partner, who then quit them to form their own group, the Crazy Dogggz, which became internationally famous. The Flight of the Conchords, meanwhile, are all but abandoned by their manager Murray (Rhys Darby) and their single obsessed fan, Mel (Kristen Schaal).

In the season opener, the duo visit Murray, who has quit his job as a deputy cultural attache in the unprepossessing New Zealand consulate, in his splendid new, gold-album-bedecked pop-manager office, in order to fire him.

“Before you came to me you were poor and you had no gigs,” Murray protests. “Now look at you.”

“We’re poor and we have no gigs,” says Bret, who is down to one shoe.

“We’re slightly poorer,” says Jemaine.

In next week’s episode, Bret spends $2.79 on a teacup, so that they might each have one -- “I just need a second to calm down,” says Jemaine when informed of this mad purchase -- precipitating a financial crisis that ends with their having to sell their instruments to pay their utilities, though they continue to perform without them.

That the two men are in their 30s makes their perseverance more poignant -- to somewhat overstate the case -- and that they have no money places them in a long and honorable line of comedians who cannot put two cents together to buy a glass of seltzer.

Fundamentally good-natured, if never what you’d call cheerful -- except during musical fantasy interludes, their pans are as dead as pans -- they continually betray each other, in small and large ways, because they are easily misled and distracted and because they are so ill-informed about the workings of the world. Although it makes excellent use of real locations, mostly in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, this is a show with a most tenuous connection to reality.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Flight of the Conchords’

Where: HBO

When: 10 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)