There’s a pretty strong case to be made that 2018 was the year that American pop culture’s growing bubble of malaise finally burst. After the chronic apathy of the ’90s begat the phenomenon of alt-rock-as-mainstream-rock, and irony plagued the 2000s, the wave of politically fueled punk and rap we were promised in 2016 with a post-Hope presidential administration never quite materialized beyond “FDT”—instead, music, film, and TV all unexpectedly went wholesome. IDLES burst onto the scene with a uniquely tender take on punk, while Big Boi was going viral for his pet owls rather than any of the songs on his recent solo LP. Joe Pera shook up the comedy world with G-rated routines largely at odds with the grotesque spectacle that is Adult Swim, as HBO’s High Maintenance continued to use stoner comedy as the unlikely format for which to give us the most unified vision of NYC since Spider-Man 2. As memes began to slip down the far-right rabbithole, new ones emerged celebrating the absolute units in our lives. There were literally two movies about Mister Rogers.
While this last reference point alone could justify the show’s existence, Kidding feels like a product of its time on a much deeper level. The two-season Showtime series that ran from 2018 to 2020 starred Jim Carrey as the local-celebrity host of a children’s TV show, with Columbus filling in for Fred Rogers’ hometown of Pittsburgh. It’s surely no coincidence that Carrey’s Jeff Pickles—who looks less “evangelical babysitter” than “deceptively kind Batman villain”—is rumored to have been a sniper in Vietnam, nor that he possesses some godlike calming quality that seems to prevent tragedy from altering his demeanor, which has long been trained on the dictates of good TV. Although the stiflingly Gondry-esque set designs and invitations for compelling dream sequences may have you believe otherwise, this is largely what justifies the series’ existence in a year already rife with Mister Rogers narratives that never fully addressed the certain angst behind the façade of someone so loving, patient, and, above all, forgiving.
Unfortunately, before I unpack all of that, I first need to set the scene for the next, less-endearing era of American culture that was already in the process of unfolding. By 2018, the recent MeToo movement was quickly descending into indiscriminate cancel culture, as carefully researched exposés gave way to an online public eager to to dispose of cultural figures for just about any perceived offense, distantly past or unavoidably present. We were at the onset of the traumaissance in mainstream pop music, an ongoing shift in the zeitgeist from a more hedonistic Obama era to a moment when grief, depression, and vulnerability sell records—so long as the artist claims to have overcome these hardships through therapy by the closing track and never confesses to doing anything remotely problematic while in the midst of the seven stages. On a political note, it also felt like liberals’ legitimate concerns about how to talk to their children about Trump were quickly becoming entirely self-centered, an opportunity to go viral while putting their needs before their kids’.
To its credit, Kidding seems fairly clued into these topics and mostly handles them well. Although its biggest draw was its reteaming of Carrey with Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry—who executive produced the series, directed several episodes, and just generally lends its aesthetic a compelling sense of goofy DIY whimsy, its main character his crippling arrested development—it seems telling that its creator Dave Holstein went on to co-write Inside Out 2 after the series was cancelled (the former music video director Gondry, on the other hand, naturally found his next muse in IDLES). Both visionaries share a mutual interest in tapping into the brains of their adolescent subjects while expressing how their adult characters struggle to act any more maturely, with this partnership bringing to mind Gondry’s past collaborations with Charlie Kaufman in its most insightful moments. Puppets aren’t the only thing Kidding has in common with Kaufman’s directorial effort Anomalisa from a few years prior, now that I think of it.
It’s hard to gauge whether Jeff Pickles is meant to be portrayed as a tragic figure with Mister Rogers’ Christ-like qualities or yet another prestige-TV antihero, though perhaps it’s the series’ point that he can be both.
Narcissism in the aftermath of grief is the focus of the series’ first season, with Carrey’s character still toting around pain and guilt shortly after one of his preteen sons has died, leading to an equally painful divorce. We watch as Pickles straddles the line between breakdown and breakthrough before the figurative camera pulls back to reveal that his father and the producer of his TV show, played by a particularly wry Frank Langella, has been pulling all the strings in his personal and professional life since day one, providing Pickles with a traumatic childhood which he then uses the show to trap his son within. It’s consistently hard to gauge whether Pickles is meant to be portrayed as a tragic figure with Mister Rogers’ Christ-like qualities or yet another antihero at the tail end of that archetypal fad in prestige TV, though perhaps it’s the series’ point that he can be both simultaneously—an idea that’s increasingly rare in fiction series, tabloids, or even our everyday lives.
Perhaps it’s homage, then, that the second and final season opens with an extended dream sequence as the protagonist lays unresponsive in the ER, as did the series that initially made antiheroism so popular in the mid-2000s. If the first season was about death, the second is about dying—a concept executed in a new storyline about a college-aged Pickles’ existential awakening leading him to channel positivity into the world through the medium of network TV after watching the crew of the Challenger go up in flames on live television, as well as in the less explicit theme of television’s slow death at the hands of new, less-mediated media technologies such as podcasting.
In exploring both of these ideas, the relationship between Pickles and his father increasingly feels like that of humanity in the face of entertainment industries like TV that abuse their power and exploit subjects and viewers alike, with Langella’s Sebastian himself referring to the introduction of the medium as comparable to “dropp[ing] a toaster in the gene pool.” The realization that Pickles (if not also the show itself) comes to is that the ideal for the medium is one of “compassionate deception,” with the slogan “It’s not a lie if it heals” standing in as a wholesome counterpart to “If it bleeds, it leads.”
The realization that the show comes to is that the ideal for TV is one of “compassionate deception,” with the slogan “It’s not a lie if it heals” standing in as a wholesome counterpart to “If it bleeds, it leads.”
The show’s own lifespan remains in focus throughout the second season, as a headspinning slate of guest stars and cameos feels like a series of Hail Marys to secure interest from at least one age demographic: Dick Van Dyke and Stacey Keach make appearances alongside Blake Griffin, Tara Lipinski, Tyler, the Creator, and the Good Witch of trauma pop herself, Ariana Grande. It’s this latter fanbase the show feels like it’s appealing to when they earnestly have a character define the well-worn songwriter’s cliché of “kintsugi” to us in the first season before optimistically suggesting that the term applies to the show’s broken subject.
There’s plenty more to cringe at here even beyond the how-do-you-do-fellow-kids dialogue written for the show’s high schoolers, but ultimately the series’ ideologies possess a sense of self-awareness that Pickles tends to struggle with. In that way, Kidding reminds me a lot of Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man, another story about a beloved or detested local TV figure that serves as a comedic cautionary tale about male density leading to divorce and plenty of false starts when it comes to any sort of improvement in one’s personal life when we haven’t figured out how to stop feeling sorry for ourselves.
I suppose these ideologies could best be summed up in the first season’s finale, which made two prescient statements: First, it bravely and fairly explicitly equated the source of narcissistic brain rot that informed all of Jeff Pickles’ worst traits with the victimhood of the aforementioned liberals who had ironically become so focused on broadcasting their parenting concerns to vast publics that it seemed to prevent them from actually doing any parenting before that was something most people were ready to acknowledge. Secondly, it seemed to forecast the exact same non-solution to that problem that was recently explored by someone who’s in some ways a better analogue for Jeff Pickles than Mister Rogers was. If it fell flat as a comedy, a late-career Gondry venture, or even an antihero drama, Kidding’s grave prophecies and offhand goofiness at least comfortably aligned it with the tradition of media studies as instigated by Marshall McLuhan. FL
