Humor so dark you’ll be embarrassed for laughing, fun rooted in death and dying, a sendup of the soul-killing bureaucracy of health-care institutions — that’s the best comedy you’re not watching.
A second season of HBO’s smart, wonderfully outrageous “Getting On” debuts Nov. 9 (locally at 8:42 p.m.) for another six episodes.
HBO’s Sunday lineup — from “The Newsroom” through “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” — is a bright spot on the week’s TV comedy schedule.
The doctors and nurses tending to the geriatric patients who are “getting on” in a long-term care wing of a California hospital are endearing if often inept.
Laurie Metcalf (“Roseanne”), Alex Borstein (“Family Guy”) and Niecy Nash (“Reno 911”) simply kill it as an ensemble, doing justice to the sharp writing of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer (co-creators of “Big Love”), who adapted the series from a British original.
It’s a glamor-free comedy about caretaking with none of the doctor-show hyper-drama of “Grey’s Anatomy” — emergencies don’t arrive by the busload, patients aren’t impaled by foreign objects. Instead, “Getting On” features quiet trauma and dreary end-of-life medical and emotional moments.
While Patsy De La Serda (Mel Rodriguez from “Community”) occupies himself with consumer- satisfaction surveys and is a reluctant, sexually ambivalent participant in a relationship with insecure nurse Dawn Forchette (Borstein), Dr. Jenna James (Metcalf) ceaselessly pushes her career and research projects, the latest regarding geriatric genitalia. Nurse Didi Ortley (Nash) is the lowest-ranking member of the staff and the only one with a clue about empathy and bedside manner.
The superficial cheeriness of a long-term-care facility is perfectly captured, a reality at once depressing and ridiculous.
Guest stars in season 1 included Molly Shannon, Harry Dean Stanton and June Squibb (“Nebraska”). The new season features Betty Buckley (“Pretty Little Liars”), Jayma Mays (“Glee”), Carrie Preston (HBO’s “True Blood”), Alia Shawkat (“Arrested Development”) and Jean Smart (“Designing Women”).
Sunday on HBO also brings Aaron Sorkin’s take on cable TV news in “The Newsroom,” back for a third and final season at 7 p.m. locally, and Lisa Kudrow’s satire of Hollywood, the commercial TV-sitcom world in particular, in a second season of “The Comeback,” at 8 p.m. Both the aging sitcom star Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) and the well-meaning members of the news team led by Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) are sympathetic characters, fighting uphill battles against corporate greed, ratings and time.
The word is out about those two series — Daniels’ Emmy win in 2013 and nomination in 2014 and Kudrow’s nomination for the first go-round of “The Comeback” saw to that. But “Getting On” has been largely overlooked.
Time to correct that. You may want to start by bingeing all six episodes from the first season on HBO Go or look for the first season on DVD, to be released next week.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
