'Kidding' Season 2 premiere navigates Jeff's guilt about running Peter over alongside memories of happier days
Showtime’s tragicomedy ‘Kidding’ has tugged at heartstrings on every episode of the first season. Jim Carrey’s Jeff Pickles is a Fred Rogers-like TV personality, a favorite among children and their parents across the nation. While his on-screen compassion and empathy are carried over off-screen, it is tainted with depression (that has a hint of edge and mania) that arises out of the loss of a child, a broken marriage and his inability to control the things around him.
The first episode of season 2, ‘The Cleanest Liver in Columbus, Ohio’, begins with grainy footage of Jeff and Jill (Judy Greer) getting married in 2003. Officiated by a Buddhist monk, as Jeff stomps on the glass with his foot, the scene abruptly cuts to where we left things off in the season 1 finale -- Jeff hitting Jill’s new beau, Peter (Justin Kirk), with his car after the latter offers him a joint. Jeff has had a hard time dealing with his son Will’s (Cole Allen) marijuana habit.
Jeff running Peter over with his car, while one of the more drastic points of season 1, was also one of the least unexpected ones. Jeff, by his own admission, dresses “like a Mormon”, and talks “like a monk”, but on the inside is “Mount St. Helens and it’s 1980 and I am magma from the neck down,” after all.
An uncomfortably long scene sees Jeff weighing the implications of his actions inside his car. The view from behind the cracked windshield feels like a perfect metaphor for Jeff’s breakdown. He’s a good man with a fragmented soul.
The episode is beautifully edited to juxtapose parallels. Jeff and Jill wildly driving Peter to the hospital cuts into Jeff wildly driving Jill to the hospital when she was pregnant, which cuts into them entering the hospital again; it could give you a whiplash had it not been done so well. This kind of juxtapositioning continues throughout the episode as Jeff deals with not just the guilt of having intentionally run over Peter but also that of him secretly living in the house next door (something that Will has already discovered). On various occasions, he tries to come clean to Jill about both, despite his sister Deirdre’s (Catherine Keener) warnings, he is unable to.
Despite the seemingly-impossible possibility of them being a happy family again, somehow, Jeff, Jill, and Will manage to have a happy Yuletide morning with presents and breakfast. The carols were abruptly interrupted by the jarring sound of a phone’s ringer as Jill rushed to the hospital to check on how Peter was doing.
Jeff’s conundrum reaches critical mass when he realizes that only he is a viable match for a liver transplant that Peter sorely needs to live. Before that, however, he confesses to Jill and Will. Even though he believes that one should “never use a bad word unless there is no good word for it,” he admits to his wife and son that it was not an accident and that he “f****d up”.
The episode ends with Jeff receiving a call from a “Pickles’ Platoon” chapter in Texas, where a little boy talks to him. Jeff, already in a hospital gown, asks him if he has been a good boy. The child in return asks Jeff: “Have you been a good boy?”
Dave Holstein’s writing in episode 1 is masterful as he navigates Jeff’s guilt and his broken life alongside the happier, more carefree, days. In the end, one thing is abundantly clear. If this is just chapter one, things are going to get so much more intense in the ones to follow.
‘Kidding’ Season 2 airs Sundays 10 pm ET only on Showtime.