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Happyish Season 1 Review

Showtime's new half-hour dramedy Happyish is a bit off-brand for the network, which usually slots the hero-with-a-dark-secret into a thirty-minute show blueprint. The new show is less Weeds, Nurse Jackie or The Big C and more Californication: a loose character study about a middle-aged guy trying to desperately fight to establish his own existence and find a reason for it. Steve Coogan's Thom Payne has no grand, mysterious backstory or any blatant reason to tip-toe carefully around revealing a second life to his friends and family. He just goes to work, loves his family and occasionally imagines advertising characters talking to him.

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Thom’s workplace is filled with interesting actors, from Carrie Preston to Bradley Whitford and Ellen Barkin, but the 44-year-old fighting against the rising tide of a younger generation feels repeatedly overused (he’s reading a book not on an iPad?!), and the show’s barely 90 minutes old as far as I’ve watched. Coogan is admittedly the show’s best asset, a perpetually stupified man-child with a holster full of cruel jabs and an always on-point, deadpan delivery. He’s actually taking over for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose passing nearly killed Happyish in its tracks. You can see where Hoffman’s moodiness and grave humor could have served him well in the series, but Coogan is a worthy successor.

Thom’s ad agency is also the source of the show’s main dramatic conflict, which results in some great – though heavy-handed – rants, from the already-mentioned Pepto Bismol Twitter situation to a Whitford diatribe on a particularly cutting workplace metaphor aimed at Thom’s displeasure of the company’s future direction. “You suck the same cocks we all do,” the actor asserts. “Admitting you don’t like the taste doesn’t make you more of a man, it just makes you less of a whore.” The show’s strung together with hot-headed moments like this, and if it weren’t for the interesting family dynamic, the thin facade would come crashing down almost immediately.

Happyish is a show that’s hard to fully recommend. I didn’t like the pilot, but the second episode’s shifted focus on Lee and her fight with an Amazon box admittedly piqued my interest, and episode three’s dramatic conflict between Thom and the Geico Gecko results in a hilariously underplayed, cathartic battle of wits (seriously, how did they get Geico, or anyone, to sign off on this?). Its cynicism becomes more bearable, its diatribes more reasonable, and its Ally McBeal-level daydreams more palatable as the show goes on.

Confirming that the show’s occasionally oppressive sensibilities, regarding life (“If you raise a happy child in this world, you’re just setting them up for failure. It’s child abuse”) and general health (“Abs don’t tell the world you’re healthy, they tell the world you’re one Twinkie away from killing yourself”), begin to generate an alluring pull just three episodes in is something I’m not sure I like to admit. But it’s also something I can’t ignore.

Fair

Too dumb to be a serious indictment of our consumerist society and too self-righteous to be anything beyond funnyish, Happyish nevertheless rises above most sitcoms of its ilk thanks to a sweet family dynamic and a dead-on Steve Coogan.

Happyish Season 1 Review