[SIZE=3][B]A Guidance Counselor’s Second (Pained) Adolescence[/B][/SIZE]
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The past few months have offered little reason to maintain a contrarian’s faith in network comedy. I was just about to bring up “Cavemen,” but I can hear you doing it first.
Artifice is the fashion of the day: exaggerated (or just plain ridiculous) characters talking fake talk in worlds sealed off in bubble plastic. Only “30 Rock” has proved itself a master of this kind of contrivance, but “Miss Guided,” a new half-hour comedy on ABC, has sped up and pulled in fairly close to its exalted parking space.
Set amid the members of a high school faculty, “Miss Guided” (which begins on Tuesday and then moves to Thursdays) belongs to the universe of stunted-growth comedy. This is a genre that has had a sporadic if successful run on television, beginning with the brilliant “Get a Life” in the early ’90s, a series that starred Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy, and getting a kick with “Strangers With Candy,” a wonderful grotesquerie in which Amy Sedaris wore a fat suit and Howard Hughes toenails to play a 40-ish high school student addicted to adolescent styles of humiliation.
These shows don’t attract large audiences but they draw devoted ones, made up, presumably, of late bloomers who indulge a giddy repulsion in thoughts of their 15-year-old selves. Caroline Williams, the creator of “Miss Guided,” seems to have been inspired by such efforts at twisted nostalgia; her show is like Ms. Sedaris’s made hygienic. Judy Greer, an Irene Dunne-ish blonde, stars as a guidance counselor named Becky Freeley who has returned to work at her old high school, a place where she languished in anonymity, blossoming only in the sense that she ate her way to a size 20.
Perky, thin and well dressed in fitted suits now, she comes back to find her old insecurities reignited by the presence of a vixen classmate named Lisa Germain (Brooke Burns), who teaches English in tight, V-neck sweaters and low-slung skirts. Lisa has been living on a cattle ranch in Spain, writing a novel, and now she’s making a play for the guy Becky likes, a dolt of a shop teacher turned Spanish instructor named Tim O’Malley (Kristoffer Polaha), whose authentic pronunciations begin and end with the word tortilla.
“Miss Guided” doesn’t rely on machine-gun rounds of dialogue; the pacing, entirely original, feels like a game of hopscotch. Guided by an ambient lunacy, the show resists forced restlessness, settling in and fleshing out its characters’ idiosyncrasies instead. Becky and her colleagues occasionally talk to the camera in a mock documentary style, explaining how they landed at Glen Ellen High — exposition that transcends simple exposition.
The series counts Ashton Kutcher as one of its executive producers, and fortunately humility has not kept him locked up in a writers’ room. On Thursday he appears as a substitute teacher, wearing thumb rings and a guitar slung over his shoulder, threatening Tim’s hegemony in the Spanish department with the look of a Gipsy King auditioning for a spread in Playgirl. Is there another young actor who more deserves the Dean Martin Award for ingeniously mocking his own image? If we’re lucky, there will be a guest appearance by Demi Moore.
Until then, we’ll make do with a guest appearance by Jamie-Lynn Spears. She turns up on “Miss Guided” as one of the students Becky advises, funny and showing no signs of the sexual misjudgment that recently resulted in her pregnancy. On sitcoms she apparently receives better adult supervision.
[B]MISS GUIDED[/B]
ABC, Tuesday night at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
Created by Caroline Williams; Todd Holland, Karey Burke, Mark Hudis, Ashton Kutcher, Jason Goldberg, executive producers; Ms. Williams, co-executive producer. Produced by 20th Century Fox Television and ABC Studios.
WITH: Judy Greer (Becky Freeley), Brooke Burns (Lisa Germain), Kristoffer Polaha (Tim O’Malley), Earl Billings (Principal Huffy), Chris Parnell (Vice Principal Bruce Terry).
[URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/arts/television/18miss.html?em&ex=1205985600&en=03134c33622c0a83&ei=5087%0A"][ via NYTIMES ][/URL]
