Camping

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.