Camping

Girls collaborators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner have adapted the British version of this comedy into a wickedly funny, unnerving eight-episode.

Created and co-written by Lena Dunham, Camping is replete with characters who are more layered than they initially appear.

When Camping allows itself to dial back the quirk, it delivers some laugh-out-loud moments and emotional observations about marriage and femininity. ... Camping is not perfect, but if it allows Jennifer Garner to explode with the white-hot rage of aggrieved womanhood, it will all be worth it.

Camping is not an easy watch, even when things are relatively peaceful among the group. But the performances are all strong, and the writing tends to find more empathy for its characters--Kathryn included--than they often have for one another.

Fine actors, one and all, saddled with playing caricatures who have one or two thinly drawn storylines apiece.

There are moments when Camping feels a little pointlessly misanthropic, and others where it just feels random. In the middle are a few laughs, a few good performances and a little bit of that "Girls" sense of humor.

The show’s better when we escape from Kathryn’s control and into the loosey-goosey ensemble, who are busy bickering, doing drugs, trading partners, and refusing to have the healthy getaway she’d hoped for.

I just wish it were possible to get more of a consistent kick out of Camping, which boasts laugh-out-loud lines and enjoyably boisterous work from its cast, but too often, is grating instead of darkly funny.

The comedy of social discomfort can be exquisite, like a deep-tissue massage that hurts until it feels good. Camping has moments like that. But too often it shoots past cringe comedy into straight-up cruelty without relief or enough redeeming laughs, becoming a “No Exit” experience of watching the terrible be terrible to the terrible.

The show runs hot and cold--well, warm and cold--depending on who’s on screen; not all these characters have been created equally deep.

The cast, it must be noted, is fine; it’s the scripts that seem to be have been drenched in Bug Juice and left to rot in the sun.

What there’s not is Dunham, the volatile agent whose larger-than-fiction persona makes the experiment so singular. Without her, the results are standard: another perfectly serviceable series about awful people, but not a special one.

For those who have felt a void in the realm of TV self-absorption since "Girls" finished its run, Camping, from that show's producers, might be the trip for you. Otherwise, this HBO adaptation of a British series, starring Jennifer Garner, makes a pretty good case for turning off the set and getting outdoors.

As a series, it’s a chore to watch. There’s nothing true or telling about the 40-something generation it casts in a ridiculously self-indulgent glow. If Camping serves any function, it’s as a summit on human failure, so the viewers can feel a little better about their own flaws.

Why the audience should invest in [Kathryn's] journey, or learn anything from it, is unclear, even if why her friends stick around is simple enough. Most of the people are there for Walt. ... Walt is nearly too shy to empathize with. They’re all living in denial about something, and only occasionally is blindness exposed to any useful effect.

Mostly it looks down its nose at almost all of its strident-in-their-own-way characters. Juliette Lewis (“Cape Fear”) enlivens the series as a crunchy hippie who clashes with Kathryn, but ultimately she’s as much a caricature as all the others.

It’s hard to discern the overall intent here. Most of the characters are either sad sacks or in Jandice’s case, demonstrably unhinged. But whatever situations they’re put in, Camping all in all is less fun than waves of dive-bombing mosquitoes.

With a different cast, it might actually work. Because she’s so immediately likable, it’s hard to buy Garner as woman with misplaced sympathies. ... Only Lewis (who’s outrageously good) and Arturo De Puerto as her new beau Miguel seem ideal. They cause much of the drama and don’t really care what the others think. When they’re around, Camping is more fun than fireside ghost stories. ... Gems drip out, but they don’t come often enough.

Garner gives Kathryn a nicely manic energy and a comically absurd kind of shrewishness. But Dunham and Konner, who co-wrote the first two episodes, seem to want to comprehend Kathryn’s awfulness rather than to present it as a simple reality in a comic setup. ... Otherwise, Camping has a zany mood and typically sharp writing that makes it more watchable in later episodes (particularly when Busy Philipps suddenly shows up). ... Camping isn’t bad either, necessarily, it’s just filled with a kind of empathy that’s rather out of place.

For every glimmer of humanity or odd moment of self-recognition, there are 10 that bear no resemblance to reality without so much as a glimmer of the engagingly absurd. They are sketches, and they’re not entertaining ones; they say things that might be funny, if a human being said them, but as lines delivered by the caricature of a really disagreeable person, they’re just off-putting.

Occasionally, Garner manages to find another gear in Kathryn’s high-strung anxiety, revealing how her longstanding health issues have shaped her insecurity and fear. But for the most part, the series wastes its potential, showing so little insight or movement that watching Camping becomes nearly as unpleasant as it is for the characters living through it.

Camping does have a good, energetic cast but they too never quite find their groove as fish-out-of-water in this would-be fish-out-of-water farce. Like Dunham and Konner, they all seem like they'd rather be someplace else--anyplace else would do.

It’s a waste of a fine cast and a bucolic setting. One possible upside for the series is that Camping might inspire people to go camping themselves, just to get away from TV for awhile.

Garner’s character receives the most significant development of the bunch, and even she’s two-dimensional at best.

Insanely controlling, petty, and pouty Kathryn, played by the poorly cast Jennifer Garner. She’s the kind of Instagram-obsessed, self-centered helicopter mom you’d want to cut off in the after-school pickup-dropoff line of cars. There’s nothing entertaining about her. ... The guests form a loose group riddled with dissent, although somewhat unified in their dislike of Kathryn. It’s like “The Big Chill” gone sour.

The casting comes off like it was just Dunham and Konner picking friends to fill out roles, which results in an across-the-board lack of chemistry (or much interest) as the story unfolds. And while Camping is indeed supposed to be a story of misery (because none of these people seem like campers, which is probably the central joke of the original series), making Walt's birthday weekend a torturous affair doesn't work if the humor that it's supposed to generate doesn't materialize. Watching becomes as big a slog for the viewer as getting through that ill-advised camping trip is for the characters.

It does not improve, and just keeps hammering the same tired joke over and over again. It’s a colossal waste of everyone’s time and talent. Cringe humor without the humor is just cringing.