The internal drama of Happyish is a little too facile to provoke any real pathos. Thom lives in a cute house in Woodstock, New York, with a wife who's by all accounts a terrific lady (Hahn is one of Hollywood’s funniest and most consistently wonderful actresses). He's on Prozac, which has dulled his libido, and he commutes to the city with tiresome finance bros who natter on vapidly about Steve Jobs’ genius on the train platform. He works at an ad agency where he’s beginning to feel hopelessly old and is derided for having an AOL account rather than a Facebook page—another overdone trope.

Thom's boss is played by Bradley Whitford, a pathetic 50-something who desperately strives to stay “with it” to satisfy clients and his own deflated self-worth. With him, the overall message appears to be that working in advertising is a soulless rat race with no hope of fulfillment. No kidding. Isn’t that something Mad Men has been telling viewers for the last seven years? Thom even makes it explicit, telling the audience, “Fuck Mad Men, there’s nothing cool about advertising.” Happyish does that a lot—tears into something perceived to be a sacred idol (the pilot begins with a screed about Thomas Jefferson). But for premium-cable audiences, such cynicism will hardly feel revolutionary.

There’s a little more substance in the Woodstock segments, mostly because Coogan and Hahn are two great actors who find some decent chemistry with each other, despite the underwhelming material. The show swerves from obvious attempts to shock (Thom imagines a conversation with the Keebler Elf that ends in suicide and a sex scene with a cartoon Ma Keebler) to fairly placid observations about the low levels of depression people must accept even as they accumulate the classic markers of success. Thom will never be happy, he decides in the pilot (his voice-over is far too prevalent and often too obvious), but maybe he can live with happy-ish.

It’s a fine sentiment, but just a bit too trite and faux-pithy, in a show that seems a little too pleased with its imagined profundity. That, perhaps, is the Showtime-comedy brand, one that's never really taken root despite the network's great success with its dramas, namely the Emmy-winning Homeland. Happyish gives off the same vibe as Californication, which starred David Duchovny as a sex-crazed novelist with a bleak, clichéd view of society; or Episodes, a damp satire of the TV industry that made Entourage look witty and incisive. Happyish is probably better than either of those shows, but it suffers from the same self-satisfied vibe, and that’s enough to keep it from ever feeling really meaningful.

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