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Hope Shrinks for Psychiatry Drama

Posted on: Friday, 31 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Diane Werts, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Mar. 31--Wow. The bonus features on the first-season DVD set of Showtime's ambitious drama series "Huff" sure make a great case for the show's brilliance. Smart interviews with its high-aspiring makers are illustrated with sharp clips from the hour's probing portrayal of Hank Azaria's earnest young title psychiatrist - a tormented do-gooder struggling to help suicidal patients, a horribly schizophrenic brother, a hard-drinking control freak of a mother, a loving yet angry wife, a confused coming-of-age son and an attorney best friend who recklessly overindulges in sex, drugs and danger.

The range. The depth. The insight.

The hooey.

"Huff" must be TV's most exasperating piece of pretentious piffle. The adult study so deftly saluted in the DVD extras is nowhere to be found in the episodes themselves, or in Showtime's two-hour second-season premiere. Despite the storylines' incessant emotional and psychological delvings, the result is an inert if not annoying muddle among unpleasantly profane people whose prospective salvation isn't worth wading toward.

If that sounds strong, it's because "Huff" asks so much of us and promises plenty in return, stringing us along through its characters' agonies with occasional flashes of smarts and wit. One of those is a three-episode guest shot starting Sunday by Sharon Stone, as a high-powered Hollywood publicist whose insatiable inappropriateness extends from martini guzzling to millions in client overbilling. And, since her new lawyer is Oliver Platt's Mr. Excess, to double trouble indeed.

Stone and Platt, both over-the-top troupers, create wonderfully wicked moments together. Yet the point to all their footsy game-playing seems to be the footsy game-playing itself. "Huff" goes close-up in inspecting its characters' psychological wounds, but the picture often seems to end there, without zooming out to flesh out the body of their lives with its larger context and crucial connective tissue. The scenes advance like a succession of random encounters, fraught with meaning that's never quite pieced together.

Sunday's show-opening sequence exemplifies that in catching viewers up to speed on the previous season's happenings. It's a 2 1/2-minute litany of horrors - patient shoots brains out, brother goes insane, wife and husband quarrel, son's teen experimenting gets out of control, friend's hedonism runs amok, mom turns lush, mother-in-law starts dying, mom sleeps with friend, shrink despairs incessantly. The incidents pile atop each other without much understanding. But even the full episodes merely magnify those incidents, and to an exasperating extent.

When Blythe Danner's live-in mother hands her underage grandson a scotch this Sunday and inexplicably confesses a particularly dreadful sin, it may not make much sense, but her dialogue sure hits home. "Whatever happened to happiness, Byrd?" she mopes. "Whatever happened to hope?"

Precisely. "Huff" doesn't exude any. Danner is superb enough to have won herself an Emmy, but her performance doesn't seem to be in service of much. Azaria, whose own four Emmys come from voicing "The Simpsons" and surviving "Tuesdays With Morrie," is out of his depth here, unable to amplify his personal pain into some grandiose saga a la Tony Soprano - the kind of epic "Huff" clearly aims to be. Not that Azaria gets much to go on from writer Bob Lowry ("Profiler,""Any Day Now"). The inexperienced creator is at sea here, too, with some goal in mind but no grounding from which to proceed, no focus along which to direct the effort.

His scripts have their moments, though, which attracts the likes of Stone, guest-to-come Anjelica Huston, and Swoosie Kurtz as Huff's ailing in-law. Her impending death seems meant to provide deep symbolism, but it mostly adds another element of unpleasantness begging to be avoided. The territory "Huff" seeks to cover is fascinating indeed - long-term marriage, grown children relating to their parents, the self-destructive impulses that play fluorescent in Platt but less overtly in other lives as well. But the pain outweighs the pleasure, like psychosis trumps perception. In the end, "Huff" is just nuts.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

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Source: Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

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