In “Cracking Up,” which debuts Tuesday on Fox (8:30 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32), network television comes up with a comedy that is, get this, funny.
Previously this season, “Arrested Development” was the only newcomer to meet, without qualification, that seemingly simple test.
Even more welcome is that it’s funny in an unconventional way, all deadpan and artfully employed misdirection, and with no laughs whatsoever emanating from the soundtrack.
In tone, it’s closer to the determined flatness of affect and adult themes creator Mike White employed in his movie “Chuck & Buck” than to the pure pop sensibility of White’s screenplay for “School of Rock.” But in subject matter, it has some of “Rock’s” accessibility.
Rapidly establishing himself as a prince of deadpan, lead actor Jason Schwartzman is, as in “Rushmore,” great, accomplishing more in his pauses after dialogue than many comic actors do in the lines themselves.
He plays Ben Baxter, a psychology grad student who moves in with the Shackletons, a rich Beverly Hills family, ostensibly to treat their 9-year-old son.
What he discovers, of course, is that the kid is the only sane one among mom and dad (Chris McDonald and Molly Shannon) and their two other kids, boy and girl teenagers.
“This is where I belong,” says Ben, on accepting the assignment. “In the trenches. With the mentally ill.”
Mom, we come to find out in ex-“SNL” cast member Shannon’s surprisingly subtle portrayal, is a sexually repressed, partly recovered alcoholic seething with resentment over what she has given up for her marriage and family.
Dad — and, here, the oft-employed McDonald (“Happy Gilmore,” “Family Law”) immediately joins “Malcolm in the Middle’s” Bryan Cranston as one of TV’s finest dysfunctional dads — is a philanderer, a possible tax cheat and a parent whose idea of the sex talk goes like this: “On your wedding night, you’re gonna have an urge to get up on your wife. You’re gonna want to get up on her. Then she’s gonna have a baby. Understand?”
The daughter (Caitlin Wachs, believably teen) has no idea her chloecheerqueenwebcam.com site might be followed by people who aren’t primarily into the craft of cheerleading.
And the stereotypical jock demeanor of the older son (Jake Sandvig) is neatly undercut by the fact that he is, to the point of near panic, a clean freak.
“You’re circumcised, right?” he asks Ben in their first private meeting.
Subversion of traditional forms is central to White making this work so well, from the sitcom-standard unlikely cohabitation turned on its ear to the family comedy format seen through the prism of psychiatry.
When the boy (Bret Loehr) walks in on Ben and a girlfriend, she worries not about the violation of her privacy, but that “his happy latency period ended.”
White gives the audience enough credit to have Ben want to leave the family almost immediately, but he also explains why he stays: It’s both a “perfect training ground” and, in a moment played with so much sitcom sentimentality that it, too, is undercut, he can’t abandon the 9-year-old to these people.
Questions aside of whether Ben Baxter can help this family, it’s a decision that bodes well for the mental health of everybody who’d like something more from television than reality shows and formulaic sitcoms.
