All Kidding aside, this is about healing
Jim Carrey delivers a melancholy and fascinating character
It took Mister Rogers, the beloved PBS children’s show host who died in 2003, many more years to posthumously break free of the condescending jokes and weird rumours about his true nature.
As the hit documentary film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” made clear this summer, there was no big mystery behind Mister Rogers — his goodness was the real deal, as near-perfect a representation of kindness, caring and spirit as one can ever hope to encounter.
That’s not entirely great news for Showtime’s new dramedy “Kidding” (premièring Sunday), a melancholy and strangely fascinating character study starring Jim Carrey as Jeff Pickles, the Mister Rogersesque star of a long-running, Ohio-based educational TV show called “Mr. Pickles’ Puppet Time,” where all is not well backstage.
Even though “Kidding’s” creator Dave Holstein (“I’m Dying Up Here”; “The Brink”) and producer/director Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) have said their show is not intended as a cheap comic exercise in imagining Mister Rogers having a nervous breakdown and a darker private life, there are too many initial similarities to completely dodge:
Mr. Pickles’ journeys each episode to an all-puppet realm. He sings clever songs and delivers messages about expressing our emotions (“I like the part of you that you don’t like — and you should, too”). His fans light up when he walks into a room.
For some of us, anything that smacks of edgy — even dirty — satire where Mister Rogers is concerned can show itself out.
But stick with “Kidding” for a while anyhow, because 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.
We meet Mr. Pickles at a personal nadir, enduring a forcibly cheerful appearance on Conan O’Brien’s talk show, where much is made of his innocent nature.
Mr. Pickles’ outside friendliness masks that, as Jeff, he’s still deeply grieving the death of his adolescent son, Phil, who was killed in a car crash a year earlier.
Now separated from his wife, Jill (Judy Greer), and struggling to relate to his other son (Phil’s twin brother, Will, both played by Cole Allen), Jeff is barely holding on.
Frank Langella co-stars as Seb, Jeff’s executive producer, whose worry for his star’s state of mind is more of a concern for the future of the show — which, even though it airs on public TV, is a cash cow of licensing and merchandizing deals.
While Jeff founders and begs Jill to let him move back into the house, Seb confides to the show’s chief puppet-maker, Deirdre (Catherine Keener), that he is already exploring ways to retire Jeff by turning Mr. Pickles into a cartoon character voiced by an impressionist.
After watching four episodes made available for review, it’s easy to detect in the writing and structure a steady twinge of the surreal, which matches Gondry’s peculiar yet effective tone.
There is the deep river of sadness that flows through “Kidding,” even as it puts Carrey’s comedic skills to their best use in a long time.
Faint comparisons to Mister Rogers turn out to be more of an asset than a flaw, because there’s really no need to waste time demonstrating to a viewer how a children’s TV host could occupy such a revered spot in the cultural psyche.
In real life, Fred Rogers was as goodnatured about the Mister Rogers jokes as anyone else, and something tells me he’d find plenty to appreciate in “Kidding,” particularly in one regard: At its core, it offers a story to grown-ups about healing and forgiveness.
“Kidding” (30 minutes) premières Sunday at 10 p.m. on Showtime/TMN1.