ONE of the grimmer sit-no-coms to come along in a dog’s age is Fox’s mostly painful “The Return of Jezebel James” from the over-hyped couple Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, who brought us 46,000 years of “Gilmore Girls.”
Perhaps trying to develop a franchise on the two-female family show, they have now come up with a show about two estranged, and not particularly engaging, sisters who are stuck living together because one wants to borrow, as she says, the other one’s uterus.
The reason? Baby production. They should have just called the show “My Sister/My Brood Mare.”
The sisters (and here comes the big fat laugh folks, or at least the big fat laugh track) are total opposites of one another. There’s Sarah (Parker Posey), an uptight, semi-hysterical children’s book editor at HarperCollins, (which just happens to be owned by the Fox family of companies) and there’s Coco (Lauren Ambrose), a slobby, free-spirited complainer.
In other words, each actress plays exactly to type. It’s as though Ambrose simply moved her wardrobe and sulking character Claire from “Six Feet Under” to a new address.
I mean, she’s exactly the same character – and, as you know if you were a fan of “Six Feet Under,” Claire, the undertaker’s daughter, wasn’t exactly good for a lot of laughs.
Posey plays Posey – which is why she is queen of the indies and not a TV star. She’s quirky and terrific, but this dull fare turns her spotlight down to dim-bulb status, and she ends up as just another face on just another sitcom.
The name of the show refers to Coco’s childhood imaginary friend, Jezebel James, who had all sorts of adventures.
Her sister, Sarah, the editor, has simply stolen the character and hired a writer to do a series of books with Jezebel as the heroine.
It never comes up that she should have given homeless Coco a royalty or anything. Instead, because Sarah can’t get pregnant and finds adoption abhorrent – among other things, she freaks out when strangers use her bathroom – she hires Coco to get pregnant, carry the baby and give it up.
Coco initially rejects the idea saying, “So I get sick, get fat, get stretch marks without even getting laid?” Now if that isn’t a laugh riot, I don’t know what is!
Rounding out the group is Sarah’s sex partner, Marcus (Scott Cohen), a man she works with but with whom she refuses to develop an actual relationship.
Instead, they say things to each other like, “I am oddly and disturbingly aroused now.”
Aroused? Even rousing viewers to stay awake would be a big accomplishment.
“The Return of Jezebel James”
Tonight at 9:30 on Fox