CHICAGO — “On Cinema at the Cinema,” the clever and seemingly unending parody of a movie review show (and much, much more) starring comedians Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, is a vision of hell, a series about two self-appointed arbiters of taste locked in an abusive relationship who need each other to do the only thing they can do — which is saying nothing of interest about the latest Hollywood movies no one asked for. Here is a show so ambitious and committed that despite 16 seasons, paradoxically, neither Heidecker nor Turkington has offered one insight into any movie.

Hell?

Or just an elaborate satire of Chicago’s most famous thumbs, Siskel and Ebert?

“Well, definitely a kind of purgatory, at least,” Heidecker said the other day. “It’s certainly not heaven. But you do feel these guys are trapped with each other — and for eternity.”

“It’s like our ‘Waiting for Godot,’” Turkington said. “We are in ruts of our own making.”

Indeed, “On Cinema at the Cinema” — its loop of never-ending nonsense is there in the title — has become a contemporary cult classic about codependence. What started in 2011 as a satiric podcast about vacuous gatekeepers, then relaunched on AdultSwim as a kind of “At the Movies” parody of film culture, now anchors its own online platform (the HEI Network) with at least 15,000 dedicated subscribers and has become something of an absurdist soap opera with spinoff shows, Oscar specials, a coffee table book. This weekend, the “On Cinema: The Certified Five Bags of Popcorn Tour” opens at Thalia Hall with a pair of sold-out shows.

Yes, Chicago has a lot to answer for when it comes to insufferable know-it-alls — Siskel, Ebert, the University of Chicago, Pitchfork — but Heidecker said the 19-city “Five Bags of Popcorn Tour” is beginning in Pilsen because of scheduling and fate, not as homage.

“And yet, (Siskel and Ebert) were so ubiquitous for Gregg and I, it’s like they’re inborn,” he said. “When we went to the TV version, it was clear that was the format we’re using.”

“This show began on the set of a movie we were both in, ironically,” Turkington said. “Between takes we recorded podcast episodes as movie reviewers, but there was no thought of Siskel and Ebert, except I’d grown up with ‘At the Movies’ and ‘Sneak Previews,’ so after a while I got cautious about not accidentally saying ‘Thumbs up.’”

In so far as “On Cinema at the Cinema” can actually claim anything like a format: Heidecker — best known as half of the surreal comedy duo Tim & Eric — plays a noxious, self-aggrandizing, entrepreneurial, right-wing opportunist and control freak; Turkington — a character actor, best known by his stand-up persona Neil Hamburger — plays a myopic fan with nothing in his life but pretending to know a lot about movies.

Each episode (they last around 12 minutes) features Tim and Gregg reviewing new movies then awarding their version of thumbs or stars — buckets of popcorn. Except every movie tends to get five buckets, while the rest of their time curdles into Tim sharing too much about his personal life as Gregg stares on, his stony, Buster Keaton-like face saying nothing and everything. Also in there, nearly every episode, is Tim complaining of being interrupted by Gregg, and Gregg being introduced as a “special guest,” and just the dumbest takes on new movies: The Bob Marley biopic had too much music, “The Hobbit” wasn’t stretched into enough movies, “Top Gun: Maverick” needed James Garner and all James Bond films are equally great.

“Really, these characters are total losers who don’t get access to film screenings,” said Turkington. “They’re children in parents’ clothes. Every once in a while, my character seems to have gone to a screening, but it was probably a focus group, and I parlay that into, ‘Oh, I attended a world premiere!’ I mean, one thing that’s a big reference for me here is the world of record collecting. I’m pretty knowledgeable, but I find the culture of that world extremely unpleasant. I go to record swaps, and I come home and tell my wife I can not do that again — all those people with smug personalities and mildew growing in their ears who seem to know everything about everything and little about life.”

He said it’s rare when they get to actually see the movies reviewed on the show, “but that bluffing, that’s what we’ve seen really gives you a super shallow viewpoint to use.”

What’s left is not a love letter to film criticism but a sort of roiling ambivalence.

Heidecker said he was reading a lot of Ebert just after they created “On Cinema.” ”For a while, I was really enjoying him. I remember this review of that Brad Pitt movie from Terrence Malick (“The Tree of Life”) and he wrote this beautiful piece that helped me understand why I liked it — and then a few months later he gave one of his worst reviews ever written to my movie (“Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie”) and it was not only a bad review, it was terribly written and dismissive and I was really disappointed by that, because I had thought of Ebert as this thoughtful voice. He died shortly after that, and I had this weird admiration for him, quickly followed by this feeling of ‘Who gives a (expletive) what this guy thinks?’”

But since the show’s 15 years coincided roughly with the decline of film criticism itself in traditional media, “On Cinema” gradually shifted its focus and acquired a remarkable interior life, as if it existed in a parallel universe where Siskel and Ebert had grown tired of the weekly mediocrity and couldn’t help but let personal failures and pettiness take over.

What began as conceptual satire about know-nothing critics with nothing to say became, Heidecker believes, more about the democratization of entertainment and the last days of Hollywood reverence. It would likely pair well with “The Studio” on Apple TV, except that, whereas that’s scripted, most of what we know about the characters Tim and Gregg and their story is improvised by Heidecker and Turkington on the spot. “The whole thing is an exercise in discovery,” Heidecker said, “because you kind of live with these people as if they’re real and don’t think of them in terms of having an endgame.”

He doesn’t usually even like to talk about the show out of character.

Turkington said they have considered ending the show before — the 7th annual Oscar special ended with the entire cast seemingly dead from carbon-monoxide poisoning — but there’s a beauty to leaving them trapped, forced to watch Smurfs and Jack Reacher.

“I would hope we’re making a huge commentary even if only inadvertently,” he said. “I do this segment on the show called ‘Popcorn Classics’ where I hold up a VHS tape of an old movie, and really, whatever movie it is, it represents years of effort by a bunch of people and was likely seen all over the planet — and eventually? All of that gets reduced to some half-remembered title that nobody really wanted to remember at all. The futility of human existence really does come into play when you find yourself holding up a videotape of a Burt Reynolds movie from 1985 and treating it like ‘Gone With the Wind.’”

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