TV Review - Channel 28’s ‘Trying Times’ a Comedic Alternative

If you think public television is invariably stuffy, you haven’t watched “Trying Times,” KCET’s half-hour comedy anthology series, returning for a second season Sunday (Channel 28 at 8 p.m., with repeats Tuesdays at 10 p.m.)

It’s time to try it.

Opening night includes the premiere of “Hunger Chic” by George C. Wolfe, followed by a re-run of Christopher Durang’s “The Visit.”

In “Hunger Chic,” Carrie Fisher and Griffin Dunne play married yuppies, trying to seal the world out of their perfect cocoon. But the world barges in, not only in the person of a flamboyant maid (Danitra Vance, who was also in Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” at the Mark Taper Forum) but also in the form of a telethon for hungry children, one of whom literally steps out of the tube.

It’s a wickedly trenchant fantasy, with especially vivid caricatures by Vance and Fisher. Buck Henry directed, stylishly, and also plays the emcee of the telethon.

Next week, “The Hit List” continues to ask the question: Just what does it take to get the self-obsessed to think about the world at large? Writer A. R. Gurney’s style is more subdued than Wolfe’s, but his answer is no less clever, and he explicitly makes the point that this is not only an American problem.

In Gurney’s half hour, Peter Riegert plays a suburbanite who comes home to find his family replaced by sultry Geena Davis, representing a mysterious do-good organization. She claims that assassins are after him. He begins to believe her.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed “The Hit List,” which will be followed by a re-run of last season’s opening episode, “A Family Tree,” by Beth Henley.

Jon S. Denny created and produces “Trying Times,” which offers a truly distinctive alternative to the half-hour comedies on the major networks.