Here and Now an HBO dud

Well, this sure as heck isn’t us. HBO’s dysfunctional family drama Here and Now (premiering Sunday) is a dreadful misfire from Six Feet Under and True Blood creator Alan Ball, about a family with more first-world problems than it can possibly count. In four episodes made available for review, 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.

Like a straight-faced sketch that fell off Portlandia’s truck and is now damaged beyond repair, the far too self-important Here and Now centers on middle-aged Portlanders Audrey Bayer and Greg Boatwright (Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins) and their four children. Audrey is a lawyer who devoted her career to a nonprofit “empathy initiative” that focuses on conflict resolution. Greg is a philosophy professor who has started to bitterly recant some of his core teachings on life’s meaning.

As young parents, Audrey and Greg adopted three children from global trouble spots – a daughter, Ashley, from Libe- ria; 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.

Whatever truth there is in that, it also 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 Bayer-Boatwright sibling, Kristen (Sosie Bacon). She is Audrey and Greg’s only biological child – a precociously intelligent high school junior who, because it’s cable TV, is perpetually up to no good.

Where do we start to try to enjoy a show like this – by viewing it mostly as a vicarious wallow?

Here and Now (one hour) premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.