New drama best left on the shelf

HBO has a real stinker in the dreadful Here and Now

Here and Now Sundays, HBO HBO’s dysfunctional family drama Here and Now is a dreadful misfire from Six Feet Under and True Blood creator Alan Ball, about a family with endless firstworld problems.

In its first four episodes, the show rummages through a mixed bag of inscrutable themes, one of which appears to be an indictment of the performative cultural correctness that sets people off nowadays.

The far too self-important Here and Now centre son middle-aged Portlanders Audrey and Greg (Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins), and their four children.

Audrey is a lawyer devoted to a non-profit “empathy initiative” that focuses on conflict resolution.

Greg is a past-his-prime philosophy professor.

As young parents, Audrey and Greg adopted three children — a daughter, Ashley, from Liberia; a son, Duc, from Vietnam; and another son, Ramon, from Colombia. The three siblings, now adults, regard their parents’ magnanimous notion of a multiracial family with resentment, as if they were chosen to be prop pieces in Audrey and Greg ’s overt display of virtue — which seems like an especially cold way to get to know a family.

Ashley (Jerrika Hinton) now runs an online fashion retail site and is married to a white man, Malcolm (Joe Williamson); Duc (Raymond Lee) has become a power-of-positivity life coach, claiming to draw energy from celibacy (which he doesn’t actually practice); Ramon (Daniel Zovatto) is in college learning to design video games and has just started dating a free-spirited barista named Henry (Andy Bean). Then there’s the youngest sibling, Kristen (Sosie Bacon). She is Audrey and Greg ’s only biological child — who, because it’s cable TV, is perpetually up to no good.

As Audrey inflicts a dressy, catered 60th birthday party upon Greg (who only hours earlier was cavorting with a prostitute), a viewer realizes that the couple are yet another thoroughly unlikable representation of progressive, upper-middle class life.

Prestige television often buys into this fractured, impenetrably morose idea of what a family is.

Greg ’s unhappy party toast about mortality (given while Kristen is losing her virginity out back in the tree house) is interrupted when Ramon suffers what appears to be a psychotic episode, linked to the mysterious apparition of the numbers “11/11.”

The last thing Here and Now needs is a Leftovers-like enigma to decrypt, but — sigh — here it comes, full of phoney portent.

Audrey and Greg take their son to a psychiatrist, Dr. Farid Shokrani (Peter Macdissi) and this is where Here and Now improves, as we follow the doctor home and meet his wife Minou (Necar Zadegan) and their gender-fluid teenage son Navid (Marwan Salama).

Though they’re no happier than the star couple, the Shokrani household is simply more interesting.

Have we, by now, checked off all the boxes?

Checking them off is all the show does, with no indication that further episodes will get better or worse.

It just kind of sits there, surrounded in snide dialogue and hollow gestures of concern.