Maybe it's because I spent nearly 10 years of my life with a NY agency, living Upstate and enduring the same posturing, egotism, back stabbing, corporate takeovers and rampant mental illness that makes me identify strongly with this series. It sure does hit the nail on the head in a big way. What puts the icing on the cake, however, are the fantasy sequences that are included in nearly every episode. They are witty, haunting, and extremely well animated, certainly a big part of what makes this series so much fun to watch. Too bad Happyish wasn't renewed for a 2nd season, but I suspect it was a lot of work producing just one season to begin with. Worth a look!

I was impressed that memoirist Shalom Auslander ("Foreskin's Lament"!) had persuaded Showtime to turn his random reflections—on human existence, the mercy of God (or lack thereof), parenting, advertising, sex and Jewishness—into a cable sitcom, but we could only stay with it for six episodes. Steve Coogan and adorable Kathryn Hahn do their best, and there are some funny bits, but I'm guessing a lot of it will seem like you've heard it before, more than once (maybe starting with the first time you got stoned with your freshman year roommate).I'm also guessing this is one of those shows, like "Frankie and Grace" on Netflix, that gets extra points from TV execs because it fills a demographic niche—in this case, forty-somethings who have ambivalent feelings about millennials and are afraid they'll never be cool again Would have been interesting to see what Philip Seymour Hoffman (!עליו השלום), who had originally signed on to play the Coogan part, would have done with it, I admit. On the + side, "Happyish" has a strong supporting cast (Bradley Whitford! Carrie Preston!), some cute animated sequences (not including IMHO the one where Coogan's character—"Thom Payne"!—schtups a Keebler elf), and a convenient time slot (between "Nurse Jackie" and "Veep") for oldsters who still watch scheduled programming on cable, but we still found it fairly tedious, unoriginal and kind of depressing after a while. Btw, Noah Baumbach's "While We're Young" (available on disk from N'flix) explores some of the same boomer-vs.-millennial themes in a much subtler and more entertaining way, IMHO.

Originally planned with the late and great Phil Hoffman in mind, Steven Coogan has taken up the mantle of the impotent and increasingly overqualified, if self- entitled main character. We are immediately thrust into the life of Thom Payne, a British (of course) shill for the advertising industry desperately clinging to relevance in a world that is leaving him behind.After a baffling and somewhat incoherent opening rant against Mount Rushmore we find out that Thom's winter of discontent comes at the hands of his new corporate overlords, half his age, and of course they are portrayed as 20 something, Scandinavian, euro- hipster clones who maliciously forsake everything Thom holds dear in the name of Twitter feeds, YouTube posts and Facebook updates.Jammed between whimsical scenes of Kathryn Hahn having arguments with her overbearing Yiddish mother (personified by a talking ups package) and a weird scene with Coogan having aggressive sex with an animated keebler elf (yes both of those things actually happen), the breath of fresh air, Bradley Whitford, emerges as Coogan's direct supervisor and voice of reason to Coogan's outlandish antics and tantrums.The show works, just not the way the creators intended. Rather than a referendum against the Internet age and millennial hipsterism, the show turned out to be the examination of aging Gen-Xers, desperately clinging to relevancy and resisting a world of their own creation.

I love the sense of humor of this show. The humor is dry and sometimes corky. For those of us entering our 40's it's really a questioning time of life. You look at things so differently, well much like the show. In season 1 E2 she refers to life as living in her bubble. Seriously life has pushed many of us into that bubble because of the negatively out there. The show does a great job capturing that underlying drama of being in your 40's and working for and with twenty year olds. Finally a show that's not all about living the "Partridge" family life. I feel as though this sector gets left out of TV because it's not a popular sense of humor or a totally positive way to look at others. The show defiantly doesn't hate on people for no reason but it surely points it out when people are wrong. Funny stuff.