James Marsters

’Union’ finds Tracey Ullman in sorry state of unfunny

When the average new sitcom isn’t funny - well, the average new sitcom isn’t funny, so it’s no big deal.

But when Tracey Ullman isn’t funny, it makes me sad.

Twenty years ago, I fell in love with the star of Fox’s "The Tracey Ullman Show," practically on sight. To remember that whip-smart half-hour only as the springboard for Matt Groening, who contributed offbeat little Simpson family animations each week, is barely to remember it at all.

Central to the sketch show were Ullman’s amazing, endearing characters: a frumpy, aging, good-as-gold office worker named Kay; Francesca, a winsome teen living with her two dads; Kiki, a rather boyish golf pro, and many more.

From 1996-’99, she lit up HBO with "Tracey Takes On . . . ," where location shooting and an ever-longer list of characters - female and male; white, brown and black - added depth and variety. Her HBO run added another pair of Emmys to the two she’d won while on Fox.

In recent years, though, her specials have been hit-and-miss, the writing uneven and the acting less than inspired.

And her new Showtime series, "Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union," misses far more often than it hits.

This "satirical look at a day in the life of America" consists of five weekly half-hour segments. Peter Strauss does off-screen narration, Scott Bakula plays a recurring guest role, and there’s a small corps of regulars, but the show is more than 90% Ullman.

At 48, the English-born star still has her agile dancer’s body and mobile, expressive Everywoman face, but she seems to have misplaced her comic chops.

Her always-blogging Arianna Huffington is fun, if a little obvious, and her fictitious yoga master sweetly, goofily frames her own face with her two bony feet.

But parodies of Suzanne Somers, Andy Rooney, Nancy Pelosi, Tony Sirico, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and David Beckham land wide of the mark. Most of the everyday characters Ullman creates - a drab Nebraska homemaker, a practical Jamaican caregiver, a woman with bad teeth, bad makeup and a habit of marrying men on death row - are just as unconvincing.

The writing is lackluster or worse. A made-up movie about the Arctic that Sirico promotes is called "I’m With This Inuit." Ullman’s Renée Zellweger, who plays a victim of "chronic narcissistic squint," simpers and flutters amusingly, but her faux film about a brain-injured woman is called "Home Frontal Lobe."

Even the narration is strangely off, as if someone had translated it from a foreign language.

Once in a while there’s a bright spot, often in the person of Padma Perkesh, a pharmacist who, when asked for prescription advice, whips off her lab coat, reveals a sparkly little dance outfit and springs into a Bollywood mini-musical on the subject. Padma made me remember why I was so taken with Tracey in the first place.

But the sparkle is all too rare. This "Union" isn’t worthy of Ullman. Short takes

• If anybody’s planning another Ted Bundy movie, James Marsters’ ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") brief but mesmerizing portrayal of the late serial murderer in "The Capture of the Green River Killer" (7 tonight and Monday, Lifetime Movie Network) would make a great audition tape.

Alas, the Lifetime Movie Network’s first miniseries visits Bundy for mere minutes in its two-part exploration of the murders of 48 young women that spooked Seattle in the ’80s and ’90s.

Tom Cavanaugh ("Ed"), who’s irresistible in comic roles, is mostly uninteresting as the Washington state detective who cracked the case. The story, stretched out over four long hours, feels slow - and if you can’t figure out what the deal is with the young narrator, Helen (Amy Davidson), in the first 10 minutes, you’re not paying attention.

• The two-part "Sense and Sensibility" (8 tonight, Milwaukee’s Channel 10 and other PBS stations) that wraps up the "Masterpiece" Jane Austen festival is a plush and pleasurable one, with winning performances by Hattie Morahan ("The Golden Compass") as the spunky heroine and Dominic Cooper ("History Boys") as a charming cad.

But the 1995 film version with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant is hard to top, and this one doesn’t even come close. Aren’t there other great dramas - American and British, old and new - begging to be made? Or has cash-strapped PBS given up on everything but the most conservative crowd pleasers?

"Sense and Sensibility" will conclude next Sunday.

• "The Tudors" (8 tonight, repeated at 10 tonight, 9 and 10 p.m. Monday, 9 p.m. Tuesday, 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday, 9 p.m. Friday and 7 p.m. Saturday, Showtime) returns for a second season, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers hard to take your eyes off but also a little hard to believe as a seething, sensual rock-star version of Henry VIII.

The highlight of tonight’s episode is an appearance by Peter O’Toole, who quite simply walks away with the whole hour as a wonderfully worldly, scheming Pope Paul III.

• The work of University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Robert Enright with Catholics and Protestants in Belfast is featured in "The Power of Forgiveness" (11 p.m. Monday, Channel 10), a thoughtful and persuasive hour on the findings of Enright and others that forgiveness is of as much benefit to victims as to those who’ve wronged them.

Especially compelling are the profiles of those who’ve lost loved ones to murder and have worked to forgive the killers. Among those featured are World Trade Center widows, members of the Pennsylvania Amish community that saw a schoolhouse massacre in 2006, and a bereaved father who has formed a unique bond with the grandfather of his son’s killer.

(You can read Journal Sentinel reporter Mark Johnson’s profile of Enright, part of the paper’s "Brainpower" series, at www.jsonline.com/694625.)

• Another dance competition? Sure, bring it on.

Modeled on "Project Runway," "Top Chef" and other Bravo hits, "Step It Up & Dance" (10 p.m. Thursday, repeated at 11 p.m. Thursday, and 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, Bravo) thrusts 12 professional dancers from a variety of traditions - hip-hop to hula, Broadway to MTV - into group and individual competition. The last man or woman to remain tapping, voguing or pirouetting wins $100,000 and instant fame.

Host Elizabeth Berkley ("Showgirls") is OK, but, as usual, most of the juice comes from the judges, who range from stern taskmasters to borderline sadists.