Jim Carrey, in The Odd, Inscrutable & # 39; Kidding & # 39 ;, is a children's show host in Meltdown: NPR

Joke it's weird It's hard to know what to do with it.

This is not a complaint.

The premise – a well-loved, serious, and Rogers-like children's program host finds herself plunged into a deep, dark emotional crisis – seems to be a staging for a cheap parody, for Cynical shots, things: children's shows; the serious; serene public facades that hide private chaos and cruelty.

Joke take some of those pot shots. More than a few. But you can say, somehow, that his heart is not there.

You may not be able to say it right away; I certainly could not. The series seems determined to keep viewers unbalanced with frequent tone changes and inducing a whiplash, shifting from light to darkness and to the back. Normally, in such situations, we turn to the central performance of the series to anchor ourselves. But Mr. Jim Carrey's Pickles, an animator / puppeteer for a long-running children's television show, won himself. So he is no help.

Carrey is a kind of quiet revelation here. He has had a wide and rubbery mimicry career, and even his most ingrained performances are tinged with a hint of need, a thirst for attention and the ills of being loved. The character of Jeff Pickles seems, at first, to express in a bare fashion this need for approval, especially in his interactions with his ex-wife (Judy Greer^TM.)

And even.

In this role, an actor known to contort his features is a blank expression and without affections. Where he threw himself after every joke, he stays motionless, rarely speaking over a whisper. His eyes remain dark and without rings, fixed on the person in front of him, but vacant. Carrey's face is more marked than we think, but he wears his hair in a long page that seems like a parody of youth. The end result is strangely and stubbornly impenetrable – a serene man on the surface but increasingly capable of provoking shock attacks.

Wisely, the series surrounds him with representatives of the public – people who care genuinely, but who are just as confused as we are. This is important.

The producer of the show, Seb (Frank Langella), seems to first slip into the boss' s archetype, familiar but adorable: The Mary Tyler Moore ShowLou Grant with The Larry Sanders showArtie, for example – but Langella delivers his lines with a certain mistrust. He gave an excellent dirty dialogue that other actors could rip, but his line readings are dumb, reserved, almost .. reluctant.

Catherine Keener (man, this cast!) Performs Deirdre, the creator of the show-within-a-show puppet characters, who sails in the troubled waters of the couple and her parents even though her concern for Jeff's well-being increases .

There is also Jeff's young son, Will (Cole Allen), who initially seems like an infamous and utterly repulsive child of the kind that has saturated prestige television in recent years, but he even has the opportunity to To deepen, complicate and surprise.

One of the recurring themes of the series – often expressed in the cold that opens at the top of each episode – is the way Mr. Pickles is universally loved in the world of the series. We are watching his influence around the world, inspiring viewers to change their lives, make smarter choices, and become better people. We see this manifesto in different ways, again and again, and we continue to wait for the series unleashed, the rug-pull, the sardonic "gotcha!" He never comes, or at least rarely, Joke Mr. Pickles' discrete messianic attitude to the world is sincere, so that the contrast between his public bliss and his private hell is more and more felt.

Showtime did only the first four episodes of Joke available for the press, which does not prove to be enough to develop a clear solution on who these characters are or where they could be directed. This critical uncertainty is the inevitable by-product of the series propensity to saw between the most extreme parts of the emotional spectrum, often within individual scenes.

What is very clear from the start, however, is how important this is. The first two episodes are directed by Michel Gondry and therefore represent a Eternal sun of the spotless spirit actor and director meeting. The visual inventiveness of the Gondry brand is ubiquitous in the series, but carefully designed not to disturb or disrupt.

Under the eyes of Gondry and the production designer Maxwell Orgell, the puppets and sets of The time of Mr. Pickles' puppets become fascinating baroque creations that destabilize, then delight, then destabilize again. There is an artisanal quality to the details of this world – like when we look at the special effects of construction paper from the children's show at work.

There is another remarkable work being done in the real world, a long and fluid tracking of Mr. Pickles, of Carrey, while he spies on his wife and son. This is an insidious but magical sequence, deliberately low-speed.

So, no, four episodes in, I can not shoot a pearl on where Joke Is ruled. If it was a more caustic series, I would expect Jeff Pickles' breakdown to accelerate and end dramatically, even violently. But the darkness of the series is always undermined by moments of humor or wonder (the first ones are more effective than the latter).

I suspect it could end badly for everyone involved. I hope it could But as the credits rolled on episode 4, I found myself sincerely hoping that this would not be the case. And anxiously waiting for episode 5.

Joke the first on Sunday 9 September, on Showtime.