No Need to Curb One’s Enthusiasm Over Comedies

The headlines are grim, all the more reason for laughter.

Yet Americans are entirely too sad, our dominant frame of reference pain. Roaring, bellowing, jaw-aching, knee-slapping yuks are needed. Fun is needed.

So right on cue tonight are two terrific new series that inexplicably are struggling to find audiences in their infancy. One is wittily bent “Maybe It’s Me” on the WB, the other Fox’s “Pasadena,” pound for pound more trashy joy than any hour in prime time.

Still more good fortune arrives Sunday in an especially hilarious episode of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the second-season comedy casting “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David as his reportedly neurotic, obsessive, iconoclastic, extremely weird self.

This time the eternally vexed David’s nemesis is a young girl’s “Judy” doll, and as always he manages to inflate a small dilemma of his own making into a major crisis that earns him the wrath of the multitudes, this time including the wife of an ABC big shot who has just given him thumbs up for a new sitcom.

Sunday’s war-delayed Emmy telecast or “Curb Your Enthusiasm”? No contest, even though this largely improvised series and its star may be an acquired taste. In three decades of monitoring TV, I’ve seen nothing funnier than this latest half-hour from David. I laughed so hard that I lost my dentures and toupee.

Is it funnier even than some of my erudite think pieces? That’s a high bar, but nearly as funny.

In addition, the fall season features the best and most creative and unconventional batch of new comedies in years, from NBC’s “Scrubs” to Fox’s underseen “Undeclared” and soon-to-arrive “The Bernie Mac Show.”

In that lofty class, also, is “Maybe It’s Me,” another of its laugh-out-loud episodes coming tonight when the earnest but hopelessly eccentric family of Molly Stage (Reagan Dale Neis) finds yet another way to mortify her in front of the high school elite whose approval she desperately seeks.

Molly recently made the cheerleading squad only to be embarrassed when her proud family showed up to loudly root for her cheers at a school wrestling match. She’s equally aghast tonight when the Stages turn her 16th birthday into a bizarre spectacle right in front of “the cool kids” she hopes to impress at school. Just how cool are these three teenage immortals? They’re captured in slo-mo as they glide confidently down the hall, eyes forward, and acknowledge Molly’s greeting without even noticing her.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“Yo.”

Although the WB touts “Maybe It’s Me’s” strong teen and female demographics, last week’s episode drew only 2.5 million viewers, ranking it 115th in the Nielsen Media Research prime-time list. How can this be? With a merry band of comic actors that also includes Fred Willard as Molly’s father, Julia Sweeney as her mother and scene-stealing Ellen Albertini Dow as her grandmother, this inventive, smartly written, endearing series from Suzanne Martin is the brightest jewel in the WB’s schedule.

You are commanded to give it a try, then immediately switch to Fox in time for the start of “Pasadena.”

Molly’s goofy family is only quasi-functional, but loving compared with the scheming Greeleys of “Pasadena,” a newspaper publishing clan that makes the Ewings of “Dallas” and Carringtons of “Dynasty” look like Ozzie and Harriet. With so many monster candidates, what’s not to love?

Not sampling “Pasadena” is positively un-American, for its appeal is rooted in the qualities that have always quickened the pulses of this nation’s TV viewers: Beauty, glamour, wealth, deceit, depravity, wickedness, humor, sexual tension and promiscuity.

These coexist seductively in Catherine McAllister (Dana Delany), eldest daughter of publishing mogul George Greeley (Philip Baker Hall). Catherine gets that ravenous Mrs. Robinson gleam in her eye when near young Henry Bellows (Alan Simpson), boyfriend of her 15-year-old daughter, Lily (Alison Lohman). When tonight’s delicious episode wraps, Catherine is ogling Henry like he’s French pastry.

Created by Mike White, “Pasadena” is for gourmands of handsomely produced, hauntingly scored, naughty prime-time serials featuring rich white trash and corporate Caligulas.

Although much of “Pasadena” is from Lily’s perspective, Catherine is its most inviting catalyst, a character Delany has in her hip pocket. When not predatory, Catherine is teary, wounded and sad, still scarred by the affair her ambitious husband, Will (Martin Donovan), has had with his assistant at the paper, where he has just been named publisher to succeed the retiring George. That has enraged Catherine’s wild and rotten brother, Robert (Mark Valley), who expected the job. He’s a despot and dumb as a log.

Meanwhile, the family’s young ogre in progress is Catherine’s 14-year-old son, Mason (Christopher Marquette), and its hapless outcast is her younger brother Nate (Balthazar Getty), a cokehead who is eyed lustfully by Lily’s voluptuous classmate, Jennie (Nicole Paggi). Catherine’s younger sister, Beth (Natasha Gregson Wagner), has the hots for Henry’s older brother, and snobby family patriarch Lillian Greeley (Barbara Babcock) is a cultured witch, plotting against everyone just on principle, and pitting her children against each other while raising backstabbing to high art.

The only admirable figures in sight are young Lily, who is learning of her family’s unscrupulous past, and Henry, whose own dark secrets are just emerging. Even more likable is the McAllisters’ housekeeper (Lupe Ontiveros), who last week got sick and threw up everywhere. I know a metaphor when I see one.

Although she is its only broad comic character, “Pasadena” uses humor drolly throughout, as when, for example, Catherine was advised last week by Mason’s school principal to consider increasing his Ritalin. After reflecting for a millisecond, Catherine replied, “Oh, OK,” then immediately proceeded to the next item on her nefarious agenda.

Nielsen Media Research says a scant 3.7 million viewers tuned in for this striking episode, which also found Catherine taking a baseball bat to the auto windshield of her husband’s former lover. The low ratings are baffling. You wouldn’t want to live amid these scoundrels, but “Pasadena” is truly a grand place to visit.

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“Maybe It’s Me” can be seen tonight at 8:30 on the WB. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children with a special advisory for coarse language).

“Pasadena” can be seen tonight at 9 on Fox. The network has rated it TV-14-DL (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language).

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” can be seen Sunday at 10 p.m. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].