Do you prefer your comedy irreverent or flat-out painful?
A wave of half-hour television is upon us this summer. But nobody’s laughing.
These new half-hours are better considered adult tragicomedies: Darker than many dramas, they’re comedic black holes on cable TV, ranging from funny to excruciating and repellent within the same episode.
They’re not mind-numbing in the way of bad sitcoms. Instead they are an odd combination of absorbing and excruciating.
Bulimics, anorexics, alcohol bingers, potheads, sexual exploiters, the washed-up and bottomed-out – these are the subjects. “Experimental,” a term used loosely, sums up the quality.
The more traditional comedies that promise reason to cheer (UPN’s “Everybody Hates Chris” and NBC’s “My Name Is Earl”) won’t arrive until September.
For now, cable’s half-hours purporting to be comedies travel peculiar paths with mixed success.
FX’s “Starved,” about people with a variety of eating disorders, quickly passes the puns about anorexia, bulimia, compulsive eating and such on the way to serious introspection concerning the emptiness underlying food obsessions.
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” also on FX, about several friends who run a bar, scores the usual sex/dating/gay jokes but then delves deeper into alcoholism and underage drinking for distinctly unsunny moments. Funny – barely – in an uncomfortable, theatrical way, some moments feel like performance art or improv exercises, albeit with nice title sequences.
Showtime’s “Weeds,” about a widowed suburban mom who supports her family by selling marijuana, has a sad streak as powerful as its humor. Welcome to anomie without a laugh track. (Hey, if it makes you morose, don’t get in the habit.) Mary-Louise Parker’s character is simultaneously sympathetic and plain pathetic.
“The Comeback,” on HBO, may be television’s most misunderstood comedy. That’s because the half-hour is only incidentally comical. Mostly it is a poignant, astute character study and cultural commentary on the subject of an aging and needy actress. Growing old in Hollywood is tragedy, and Lisa Kudrow’s subtle performance as an ex-sitcom star suffering endless humiliations is artful.
For FX in particular – after delivering remarkably gritty dramas “The Shield,” “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me” and, this season, “Over There” – the venture into neo-comedy is risky. The reception for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Starved,” both on Thursday nights, has been mixed. It would be easy to say the network should stick to drama.
But this crop of not-quite comedies is interesting as a measure of how agitated, introspective and self-critical the culture is these days. They deserve an advisory: Those seeking laugh-out-loud humor should look elsewhere. But these shows also deserve attention. They aren’t sitcoms so much as experimental half-hour ensemble pieces groping toward a new version of TV comedy.
When it comes to drama, “We don’t do allegory,” FX honcho John Landgraf said. By that he means he’ll leave allegorical dramas about a Depression-era carnival, a Wild West outpost and ancient Rome to HBO while FX sticks to present-day realities like tough cops, emotionally wounded firefighters, plastic surgeons and troops in Iraq.
But can FX do comedy? FX’s “Starved” and “Always Sunny” don’t measure up to HBO’s truly groundbreaking “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But they are even less sitcom-y than Larry David’s exploration of modern middle-aged male narcissism.
Eric Schaeffer, creator and star of “Starved,” talks openly about his drug and alcohol addictions and thinks most people can relate to food issues. In promotional material, Schaeffer said, “While addiction, like life, is often dark and terrifying, recovery comes from mining our true humanity, with all its pathos, hope, love and humor.”
Today’s comedies, like life, are often dark and terrifying.
Sitcoms were once a means of entertainment. Folks liked them giddy or mindless. That was before the paranoia of the new millennium. Today, if this summer’s cable experiments are any indication, giddiness isn’t enough.
Half-hour television is more than a diversion – it’s a means of recovery.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
