For years, I’ve been kvetching about the thumb this culture lays on the scale for cable dramas, from “Boardwalk Empire” to “Dexter,” while sitcoms get the stink eye. It’s a bias common to highbrow TV fans and more than a few critics, but if you learn to ignore dreck like “Two and a Half Men,” you’ll find a boom in network comedy, from the machine-gun wit of “30 Rock” (which returns January 12th) to the sunny “Parks and Recreation”; “Community” and “Cougar Town” (two fantastic shows infuriatingly on hiatus, but my fingers are crossed they’ll come back); plus the newer “Happy Endings” and “Up All Night.” Cable has its own terrific sitcoms, especially FX’s “Louie,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and “Archer,” as well as HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Enlightened.” (“Bored To Death” would be on this list, but it just got cancelled. Boo!)
With so many worthy comedies out there, it would be easy to miss out on a pair of quietly excellent network shows: “Raising Hope” and “The Middle.” Neither is new and neither has a Zooey Deschanellish star to land them on the cover of a magazine, but both series are funny, original, and stealthily ambitious. And to be terrifically snotty, each of these family sitcoms is superior to that buzz-hog “Modern Family,” an upscale mockumentary that began with promise, but has sadly descended into cartoon and cornball.
“Raising Hope” has the opposite issue: it looks cartoonish but is actually sophisticated. Created by Greg Garcia, the show has a premise that sounds bananas, but here goes: a likable, aimless teen-ager, Jimmy (the endearingly blank-faced Lucas Neff), had a one-night stand with a female serial killer. After she is executed, he is left to raise their baby, Hope, with help from his family—a mom who works as a maid (Martha Plimpton) and a heavy-drinking pool cleaner dad (Garret Dillahunt), themselves former teen parents.
Like “My Name Is Earl,” Garcia’s earlier show, “Raising Hope” revels in white trash surrealism. But once you get used to its wacky parameters, you find a series as bold in its structural risk-taking as “Community.” Most recently, the show took the standard “It’s A Wonderful Life” premise and rolled it into a snowball of crazy. Another installment was pegged to a truly obscure reference: the documentary “Marwencol,” in which a brain-damaged man obsessively builds a 1/6-scale Belgian town from the Second World War in his backyard. In the “Raising Hope” episode, Jimmy’s dad chides him for having become too girlish. Trying to find his bad-boy side, Jimmy accepts his sketchy co-worker Frank’s invitation goes to go “blow things up,” only to find that Frank means balloons—and that Frank has built a miniature replica of their town. Like the artist in “Marwencol,” Frank uses his tiny town to work through a trauma, the damage left by a childhood bully who called him a girl. With flashbacks, quick-cuts, and a fusillade of wackadoo gags, Garcia builds a truly peculiar exploration of over-compensating masculinity. Except funny. And not preachy. And with a fistfight at the end. It’s great. Go find it on Hulu.
Next, there’s “The Middle,” which also looks conventional but has a despairing undercurrent reminiscent of (stay with me) the comedian Louis C.K. Patricia Heaton plays Frankie, who lives in small town Indiana with her husband Mike (Neil Flynn from “Scrubs”). Long-married working parents, they are strapped and overwhelmed by their three kids: bookish weirdo Brick, girl-dork Sue (the outstanding Eden Schur), and the lanky, sardonic teen-ager Axl. A Roseanne-ish premise, except that Roseanne boiled over with confidence. In contrast, Frankie is convinced she’s a nothing; the show is nearly metallic with anxiety, as Frankie struggles each week with the idea that she and her husband are mediocrities, doomed to fall from stability into outright chaos, unable to guide their kids to anything better.
The show has moments of real warmth and a terrific ensemble. (I especially love Sue Heck, whose dorky innocence is a break from smartass teens elsewhere on TV.) But the show also thrums with a bass note of fear, and, like “Raising Hope,” it’s unafraid of bizarre gags. In one standout episode, Frankie accidentally eats her son’s toenail clippings. (Yes, yuck: there’s an explanation, but I won’t get into it.) Horrified, she has a breakdown, fleeing the family and leaving her children to debate what has gone wrong. The discussion among the kids is hilarious, but there’s also something ineradicably dark mixed in: an acknowledgment that parents fantasize about running away. This is where the “Louie” connection arrives: the show may look nothing like the comedian’s much-praised indie sitcom, but it’s daring enough to tiptoe close to a similar type of anguish, toward an acknowledgement that a family can be more of a trap than a comfort.
I realize that does not sound hilarious, but “The Middle” often is. Sadness, even bitterness, has been a the crucial ingredient in much of the best modern comedy. And while sitcoms get mocked for being formulaic, the irony is that sometimes, by cracking that structure from within, it’s possible to find more depth, and more adult emotion, than Nucky ever dreamed of.
