Season 1 of Showtime’s Jim Carrey–led dark comedy Kidding was one of the best and most underrated television shows of 2018. The story of a children’s TV host (not Mr. Rogers, but Rogers-adjacent) whose inability to express negative emotion after a lifetime of repression is as relevant as ever in 2020, when the question of what to do with bad feelings generates unyielding discourse on mental health, trauma, and masculinity.
Season 2 picks up after Jeff's bottled rage exploded in a worst-case scenario for his character and sprints towards a remarkable exploration of what it means to acknowledge pain. It might seem hyperbolic to describe Kidding as TV’s most brilliant comedy, but the evidence is abundant in every single episode of Season 2.
The writing is close to perfect, with laugh-out-loud one liners and gut-punch realizations that unravel the characters and always serve the core message of the show. None of Kidding’s dialogue comes off as a throwaway line or unimportant aside (even in the episodes featuring a talking baguette), which makes each 30-minute chapter of Jeff’s story feel dense and satisfying in a way many individual dramedy episodes lack.
Season 2 picks up after Jeff's bottled rage exploded in a worst case scenario for his character and sprints towards a remarkable exploration of what it means to acknowledge pain.
That dialogue is brought to life by Kidding’s incredible cast, with Frank Langella and Catherine Keener performing particularly well as Jeff’s father Seb and sister Deirdre. Kidding’s blended tone of magical realism and hard truth is difficult to nail and those two show up wielding sledgehammers. Keener’s exasperated reactions to the chaos surrounding her, and the position of authority she assumes to manage it, make for some of the funniest scenes of the season. As for Langella, he pulls double duty in playing Seb and also voicing the younger version of his character.
Also, young actor Juliet Morris deserves an Emmy in every category for her performance as Deirdre’s potentially evil, axe-wielding daughter Maddy. Everything that comes out of that kid’s mouth toes the line between abjectly horrifying and wildly inappropriate. Her world-weary deadpan delivery is one of Kidding’s secret weapons.
And then there’s Jim Carrey. The Mashable review of Season 1 pointed out the similarities between Carrey and his character, two megastars whose inner life is overshadowed by the emotionally blunted comedic characters that made them famous. Kidding isn’t afraid to utilize Carrey’s recognizable comedic strengths — funny voices, rubbery expressions, and supernatural powers of rapid enunciation — to fuel the meta-comparison, and proves in Season 2 that no one could play Jeff and elicit the same depths of emotion and understanding from his audience.
No one could play Jeff and elicit the same depths of emotion and understanding from his audience.
Carrey can make a goofy face look devastating and make devastation look goofy. He deserves another Golden Globe nomination for Kidding, if not an Emmy this time. Preferably with a win.
One of Kidding’s episodes this season will serve as the bar every other TV show must meet or surpass to become the best 30-minute comedy episode of the year. It’s only February, but the technical sophistication and emotional arc of episode 2, “Up, Down, and Everything in Between,” is just that good.
In it, transitional camera work moves Jeff from the real world to the world of his television show in a bafflingly beautiful single take that gives off an illusion similar to seeing the Land of Oz in color for the first time. The rest of the episode follows him on a musical adventure that has Jeff singing, dancing, getting roasted by puppets, and finally confronting the root of his emotional repression in a finale that may or may not have made a Mashable reviewer cry three times while rewatching and once when she glanced at a completely unrelated vacation advertisement that made her think about it on the subway.
The closest analogues to Kidding’s excellence are Netflix’s BoJack Horseman (which just ended, so anyone looking for a new show absolutely move on with Kidding), and HBO’s Barry, both of which have their own ways of interrogating trauma with comedy. Kidding sits thematically alongside these because like them, it is a smart show that knows its tone and feels entirely sure of what it’s doing at all times. It’s superlative television. Watch it. See you at the bottom.
A previous version of this article stated Frank Langella voiced Hopskotch the Sasquatch in addition to his role as Seb. Hopskotch is voiced by guest actor Dick Van Dyke.
