'Kidding' Season 2 Episode 3 is a masterclass in packaging grief and nervous breakdowns in a zany way
There are a few shows that can do what Showtime’s ‘Kidding’ does best -- articulate one’s steadily degrading mental stability. Whether it is Jeff Pickles’ (Jim Carrey) slow descent into lunacy or his sister Dierdre (Catherine Keener) reaching a breaking point, it’s both beautiful and disturbing to witness.
Like Foster The People’s iconic 2010 song ‘Pumped up Kicks’ -- where the cheerful upbeat music all but masks the grim lines about a school shooting, and you come to a horrible realization all of a sudden -- ‘Kidding’ with its rainbows-and-cupcakes vibe quite shocks you when you see what is really happening; how people break.
Take Jeff for example. His admittance to the fact that he tried to actually kill his wife Jill’s (Judy Greer) new boyfriend Peter (Justin Kirk) led to Jill finally considering divorce as a real option. How does Jeff react? In season 2, episode 3, he throws himself into his fans (he calls them friends). He begins ideating on how to be more in touch with these children and some of those ideas are borderline creepy.
Dierdre, who is going through a divorce herself -- her husband was secretly gay and she caught him, pardon the pun, red-handed -- has now a new problem to deal with: she is being threatened to give up custody rights to her daughter. In the scene where she realizes the full weight of the prospect, Dierdre destroys her puppets and materials. It would have been an outright horrific scene, almost akin to how Toni Collette destroys her miniatures in a fit of grief and anger in ‘Hereditary’, had it not been for the fact that the music behind was audaciously comical. Added to that, the visual effect of flying puppet and doll heads weirdly balances the emotions.
‘Kidding’ in that manner gives viewers a whiplash.
As Dierdre begins to explode -- and one would expect her to burst into confetti or stardust, given how much ‘Kidding’ loves its magical realism -- Jeff gets eerily and scarily calmer, convinced that his plan to be able to “listen” to all of his friends would be a success, not accounting for, among other things that this was in many ways a violation of privacy and would also give him the kind of power he wasn’t equipped to handle.
The creators of ‘Kidding’ have mastered the art of packaging grief and depression and all of its accompaniments into this zany, cheerful, and outright colorful package. And that is what sets it apart from everything else on TV right now; or maybe, ever.
'Kidding' Season 2 airs on Sundays at 10 pm EST on Showtime.