Kidding

This is a story about a man who is suffering but continues to put those he loves ahead of himself. It's simultaneously tragic and inspiring. Showtime has something special with Kidding.

Bold, provocative and at its core heartbreakingly endearing, it borrows from the original mold--and then breaks it.

Like a kid’s show, Kidding wanders off here and there in order to maintain our strict attention, and the digressions are part of what makes the show work as well as it does. ... What’s developing is a comedy jewel, albeit one wrapped in a shroud. ... The miracle is that the show is so moving. And, even better, so funny.

Showtime's best and most binge-worthy series in a long time. ... The result is funny, wildly inventive and utterly sad. To pull off what is conceptually the implosion of Mister Rogers is a real triumph.

Langella is a master of deadpan comic timing as Seb. ... Greer is equally wonderful as Jill, who tells Jeff being married to Mr. Pickles is like being Mrs. Santa Claus. Nobody cares about Mrs. Claus! And then there’s Jeff/Mr. Pickles, and what a pair they make. ... Carrey is brilliant.

Jim Carrey makes a triumphant return to TV with Kidding, a Showtime series that reunites him with the director of one of his best movies, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." The result is a sweet, melancholy, occasionally funny show that marks one of the new TV season's early highlights.

Carrey’s committed turn as Jeff Pickles, a children’s television host whose son recently died, is immediately convincing and endearing. ... Series creator Dave Holstein delivers sharp commentary on corrupted innocence and toxic cynicism. The half-hour non-comedy is fixated on death enough to make even the most morbid fan uncomfortable, but through four episodes, it shows signs of a lighter, broader scope and is buoyed by unrelenting optimism.

Carrey does excel at transforming a character’s inner torment into outer hijinks--but for now, it’s a compelling story about the beauty, and difficulty, of giving your pain a name.

The personal toll the demand of celebrity takes on someone desperate for real connection. An audience’s insistence that the connection they have to someone on TV is real, and can’t be shattered. They are provocative, meta conversations raised especially by having Carrey in this role, and they elevate the show even as its quirkier dramedy subthreads begin to run amok.

Its empathy for its main character is no mere folly, and the performances--especially Carrey’s--subtly push the material toward an achingly valid exploration of the human side of hero-worship.

Kidding is taking audiences down a rabbit hole of emotions that’s as dotted with clever dialogue and sharp acting as it is with philosophical inquiry. Meaning that it’s worth getting lost inside Mr. Pickles’s brain as he figures out what the world has in store for him.

Decent, scrupulous and caring, Jeff Pickles is the essence of good--a little too good. Even the mild-mannered may want to slap the sanctity out of him. But most will want to watch Carrey deliver a fine performance in a weirdly engaging series. Building a comedy around the death of a child is risky, but Carrey makes it winning.

It is almost inevitably an odd show, though perhaps not always in ways it means to be. I found it interesting and frustrating by turns, but worth recommending on the strength of its cast and its best scenes.

Holstein designs Carrey's role to capitalize upon what we know best about him, especially his sanguine smiles and rubberized buffoonery. The actor places those qualities into Jeff in a way that captures the damage and frailty sorrow creates in a person. As such, Kidding displays the potential to be vastly endearing although, initially, its inability to be pegged as one kind of show or another can prove frustrating at turns.

The supporting acting is strong, with Langella, Greer, Kirk, and Keener all as good as you might expect. Langella, in particular, is remarkable as a man who is unfeeling and perfectly comfortable with it. If and when Jeff becomes more credible, and not just a fairy tale persona, the entire ensemble will be solid as a rock.

Kidding is melancholy more often than laugh-out-loud funny, and well-acted even if some of its character development is lacking. More than anything else, it’s a showcase for Carrey.

Carrey is wonderful, making Jeff feel like a fully-realized person, even as Holstein and the other writers can’t always decide where the naive children’s show host ends and the man playing him begins. ... The rest of the show is a mixed bag, much of it feeling like the Showtime quirky dramedy formula (see also: United States of Tara, SMILF) on full blast. ... Carrey’s worth the price of admission, though.

Kidding finds Carrey and Gondry drilling into the bedrock of memory and trauma, displaying how two people can perceive and channel the same source of pain in distinctly different fashions. It just doesn’t do a great job of doing that beyond people who aren’t Jeff or his onscreen alter ego. ... There is ambition, talent, and imagination to spare here, which is what makes Kidding worth watching where other, similarly messy cable series in this register aren’t.

When the show's sense of humor becomes more whimsical than dour, a heaviness is lifted; the series shines in more understated, earnest moments. When the series tries to do too much, it's really just, well, kidding itself.

Initially sullen and bitter, Kidding improves as it goes along. At the very least, you get used to Jim Carrey as an ersatz Fred Rogers.

Directed by Michel Gondry, Kidding occasionally shows sparks of the magic he brought to his previous collaboration with Mr. Carrey, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but there’s not enough of the show-within-a-show for Mr. Gondry’s wonderfully wacko visual style to get much play.

Overall, Kidding is just an odd duck of a TV show that might divide audiences because it’s not actually about much other than the heaviness that comes with caring. It’s inconsistent, tonally and quality-wise, but the parts that land do so beautifully.

Those tuning in for one of Carrey’s trademark manic performances will be disappointed. This is a much more mannered, subtle performance, and while you can admire the commitment to the role, you can find yourself perplexed by the execution. In the supporting cast, Langella is stand-out, a maestro at delivering deadpan snark.

The series' quirks don't translate to a rich cleverness, or create the heartbroken laughs that Kidding dreams of. For a show that's full of pain, on-screen talent and so much potential, Kidding is just not very special.

Kidding has an exceptional ensemble to work with, but drowns it in rote domestic plotting.

Through the first two episodes, Kidding has the slightly whimsical but basically naturalistic vibe of an indie family drama. ... When the series turns to Sebastian, a cold and implausible father, and his plotting, it feels as though Kidding is not quite confident that its two elegiac central questions--how to be sad and how to be good--are interesting enough. If the show could make itself comfortable with Mr. Pickles’ gloom, they could be.

There’s something curious and affecting about a family that communicates its emotions mainly through fabric and googly eyes. Which is why it’s disappointing to see Kidding eventually turn into a more-familiar kind of pay-cable adult dark comedy. ... Its best moments come when it’s willing, like Uku-Larry, to own its feelings. The show, unfortunately, seems a little afraid of them.

Through the four episodes (of the season’s ten) screened by this critic, Kidding has yet to manifest a coherent tone. The frank jocularity of the wisecracks bumps up against rogue jolts of cutesiness and a slightly dirty realism, familiar from Sundance dramedies. ... One also wants to attribute the slow-boil mood and occasional low-key tone of Carrey’s strong performance to Gondry.

Dondry works in an abstract style with a minimum of narrative momentum, but sometimes the characters seem stranded from one another. That we’re all disconnected may be his message, but Kidding is going to have to give us more than Carrey’s sad-sack face to stick with the show--though it’s got some promise.

Despite some nice touches and performances, Kidding gets stuck somewhere between comedy and drama, and isn’t entirely successful at either.

It tries to capture the kind of strange and bruising tone that made “Eternal Sunshine” so good; sometimes, it even succeeds. But more often than not, Kidding feels caught between too many tones and ideas to become quite as distinctive as it could be.