Camping is a long, uncomfortable trip
When we first see Kathryn (Jennifer Garner), she’s leaping into the air in slow-motion, against a backdrop of nature and blue sky. It’s a performance: She’s having her husband, Walt (David Tennant), snap her picture for her Instagram account (which is “cresting 11,000 followers”). She rushes over to see the images, her happy face flickering off and her eyebrows pitching a tent of anxiety. “Did you like it?” she asks. “It’s kicky, right?”
Kathryn and Walt are heading into the California wild for a weekend trip, with friends and family, to mark his 45th birthday. But the celebration is secondary to the show’s primary interest: Kathryn’s constant effort to present, both for her virtual followers and real-life compatriots, an air of joy that she achieves through military rigour. She takes severe pains to appear carefree. You could describe “Camping,” which airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO Canada, as a comedy of severe pain. Kathryn has had a hysterectomy — her Instagram account is aimed at “working moms and women living with chronic pain” — and the series makes a running joke of her continual complaints about her pelvic floor. There’s physical injury and emotional injury and the woe Kathryn inflicts on her less-than-rustic guests with her idea of strictly scheduled fun. (Friends don’t make friends bird-watch.)
The comedy of social discomfort can be exquisite, like a deeptissue 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.
“Camping” comes from Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner of “Girls,” who adapted it from a British series along with John Riggi, and it shares their previous show’s penchant for skewering the myopic urban privileged.
Kathryn and Walt (a nebbishy sap, quietly suffering a yearslong sexual drought) are joined by her sunnily dim sister, Carleen (Ione Skye); Kathryn’s estranged best friend, Nina-Joy (Janicza Bravo); their partners (Chris Sullivan and Brett Gelman); and one uninvited, unenthusiastic teen, Sol (Cheyenne Haynes).
Everyone in the group, unbeknown to Kathryn, regards her with something ranging from dislike to fear, while she nags, passive-aggressively judges and treats her son Orvis (Duncan Joiner) as if he were made of glass. She’s a helicopter parent, a helicopter wife and a helicopter friend. The dynamic is destabilized when the recently separated Miguel (Arturo del Puerto) shows up with his new girlfriend, a free-spirited DJ/reiki healer/ artisanal nut-cheese maker named Jandice (Juliette Lewis, in a Juliette Lewis role). She’s the anti-Kathryn, impulsive, wild and irresponsible, and her presence pops open the group’s tensions like the lid on a novelty can of snakes. It’s hard at first to pinpoint where “Camping” goes wrong, because there’s a lot right with it. It has a solid comedic cast, from the crisply tight-wired Garner on down. (Bridget Everett wrings every drop from a small role as the rough-edged proprietor of the campsite.)
Dunham and Konner, as on “Girls,” have perfect pitch for the language and mores of this stratum of society. (Who else would have an antiques dealer sell a vintage ring to a couple of bohemian 40-somethings by noting that it “was given to Liz Phair by John Cusack”?) And there’s something of-the-moment in Kathryn’s character, a woman driven half-nuts by the Goopian pressure to model perfect motherhood and hospitality.
The core problem is how cartoonishly the show draws Kathryn. I found myself becoming sympathetic to her for no other reason than that “Camping” is so stacked against her; I don’t know if it’s possible for a show to bully its own protagonist, but it might look something like this. Not that the show is especially generous to her self-indulgent, solipsistic companions, either. (The only adult not made into a caricature is Nina-Joy, who’s given hardly any personality at all.)
There is, on paper, the material to go deeper with Kathryn — to ask, without sacrificing the lacerating humour, what made her this way? “Girls” was expert at showing when its characters were full of it while also exploring just what filled them with it.
But “Camping” doesn’t seem to have any such curiosity. That might yet work if it were simply funnier, if it built momentum from the cascading disaster of the ill-conceived trip. Instead it drags, hitting the same notes about Kathryn’s obliviousness and self-dramatizing, and it starts to feel like a long weekend indeed.
The show is all the more frustrating for the amount of potential and talent involved. “Camping” could be a cutting social satire of the modern drive to try to make one’s life live up to the impossible perfection of staged moments on Instagram. But it’s hard to see past the harsh filter.
“Camping” airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO Canada.