What’s “Real Rob” doing on Netflix, besides bringing down the curve?

A couple of possibilities present themselves. Rob Schneider, the show’s star, reportedly put up the majority of the production budget himself. For Netflix, which quietly announced its acquisition of “Real Rob” just two months ago, it’s like playing with the house’s money.

Then there’s the Adam Sandler connection. Schneider and Sandler were the Hope and Crosby of 1990s and 2000s American film comedy, and Netflix is now in business with Sandler — it will soon present the premiere of the feature “The Ridiculous Six,” the first Sandler-Schneider collaboration in five years.

So what did Netflix get with “Real Rob”? It’s hard to say definitively, because of the eight episodes scheduled to be available for streaming Tuesday, only Nos. 5, 7 and 8 were available to critics. It’s a novel approach, providing the ending of a season but not the beginning. As if the less we understand, the better.

The series is in the category of fictionalized autobiography, something Schneider has tried before with a notable lack of success (“Rob” on CBS in 2012). In that case, he played a landscape architect with a beautiful young Mexican-American wife, who was played by the actress Claudia Bassols. In “Real Rob,” he plays Rob Schneider, a comedian with a beautiful young Mexican-American wife, and he’s cut out the middlewoman — the character is played by Patricia Azarcoya Schneider, who in real life is Rob Schneider’s beautiful young etc. She also has credits for writing, producing and casting.

Even without the first four episodes, it didn’t take long to figure out that the show’s Rob was about to shoot a new sitcom and the show’s Patricia was opening a high-class male strip club. Their efforts are complicated by Rob’s boneheaded assistant, Jamie, played by a Schneider buddy named Jamie Lissow. Every so often there’s an “aw” scene featuring Rob and Patricia’s daughter, played by the Schneiders’ 3-year-old daughter, Miranda Scarlett, who receives fourth billing even though she has no dialogue.

Rob Schneider seems to be trying to combine the Sandler-Schneider style of gross-out humor with the minimalist sensibility of current premium-cable and digital comedy, which might be interesting in theory but here has a numbing effect, like the long afterlife of Novocain. Some of it is execution — ideas that could be funny, like a bank teller who has an orgasm at the mention of Ryan Gosling’s name, are handled clumsily and go on for far too long. Some of it is performance — Rob Schneider is the only regular cast member who knows how to create a character.

And some of it is just bad decision-making, like a long, agonizing scene of Jamie on the toilet that would have been right at home in “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.” (To reinforce the point, Jamie has a poster of that Schneider film opus in his apartment.)

Still, Rob Schneider has his hangdog charm, and when he’s on screen by himself the show is tolerable. It’s telling that the best scenes are the snippets of Rob’s stand-up — this is his “Louie” moment — when he gets to do his bare-bones but oddly effective impressions. (Stephen Hawking breaking up with a woman: “I’m leaving you. Please open the door.”)

In keeping with the self-reflexive nature of the show, the fictional Rob sometimes says things that seem to illuminate or comment on the actions of the real Rob Schneider. Such as: “I have enough money. I did 17 movies with Adam Sandler.” Which probably answers my initial question.