Paige Alexander, the high-maintenance mom played by Kerry Washington in the Hulu dramedy “UnPrisoned,” puts her family and friends through a lot. She’s also a challenge for the show’s captioners: Rendering her continual nervous laughter, which punctuates the soundtrack like the sputtering of a rusty muffler, calls for creativity. In Season 1, (laughs), (laughter) and (laughing) were supplemented with (snickers), (snorts), (chuckles), (chuckles awkwardly) and other descriptors of uncomfortable mirth.
That Paige is a marriage and family counselor and also a jittery basket case is the comic framework of “UnPrisoned,” which returned with a new season on Wednesday. The therapist needs therapy, and she gets it from everyone: her father the ex-convict; her son the anxiety-ridden gamer; her foster sister the libidinous real estate agent; and even, in Season 2, her therapist, a self-absorbed but helpful showboat played by John Stamos.
Running in parallel, and neatly explaining Paige’s problems, is the dramatic framework, in which Paige and her dad try warily to reconcile after his latest stay in prison, a 17-year stretch. His repeated absences from her life are the reason she is a reflexively negative, critical and untrusting control freak who dates only unattainable men. He’s in his 60s and suddenly has to grow up; she’s in her 40s and still has to get over her daddy issues.
Created by the television writer and relationship maven Tracy McMillan, “UnPrisoned,” which is based on McMillan’s life, is a better-than-average family comedy-drama, deft and ordinary in equal measure. Its quick half-hour episodes weave clever, familiar relationship humor with poignant reflections on the consequences of incarceration.
The material is what it is: worthwhile, but not too far north of pleasantly watchable. “UnPrisoned” can be hard to click away from, though, because Kerry Washington is such a quietly vivid, thoroughly alive presence at its center. Whether or not you buy what the show is selling, you don’t for a second doubt the realness, the ineluctable authenticity, of Paige Alexander, even as she’s driving you crazy.
Washington received plenty of attention, and two Emmy nominations, for her career-making run as Olivia Pope on ABC’s “Scandal.” But her talent and magnetism still tended to become a little lost amid the Shonda Rhimes circus, overshadowed by costumes, melodrama and take-no-prisoners attitude.
In “UnPrisoned,” Washington executes sitcom formulas so skillfully, and with such seeming ease, that it’s easy to miss just how commanding her performance is. It’s the old comedy trick of making the central character simultaneously intolerable and irresistible, and she pulls it off seamlessly, like a latter-day Harlow or Hepburn. And like them, she tosses in her unforced, inescapable glamour, a quality she carries around the way the rest of us tote a cellphone.
Washington has a good sparring partner in Delroy Lindo, who gives a touching, mostly restrained performance as Paige’s father, Edwin, without sacrificing his considerable charisma. And the scene-stealing Jordyn McIntosh gives the show a jolt whenever she pops up as Paige’s childhood self, rolling her eyes and providing obscene commentary on what a lonely loser she has turned out to be.
In the show’s first season, the fairly standard family and relationship humor was given a strong added dimension by the depiction of Edwin’s fortunes post-prison. The theme of incarceration was inextricably bound up with race, and when Edwin entered into Paige’s obsessively organized, rules-bound world, he was quick to call her out for being bougie, as in not really Black — a condition that we could see was her reaction to the chaos he had engendered in her life. So a running theme of the season, just below the surface of the action, was Paige’s becoming more comfortable with her heritage.
That idea is less present in Season 2, and some of the show’s urgency goes with it. The focus shifts away from the possibility of Edwin’s return to prison, and the effect that would have on Paige and her son, Finn (Faly Rakotohavana), and moves to more predictable sitcom dynamics: Finn’s desire to meet his own father (Oliver Hudson), who turns out to be a slender stereotype of the feckless touring musician, and Paige’s desire to rekindle her relationship with Mal (Marque Richardson), Edwin’s mild-mannered parole officer.
It also becomes more noticeable that Paige’s therapy practice seems to consist entirely of posting sassy Instagram Reels (laughter). As long as it’s Washington recording the videos, though — exquisitely performing Paige’s particular blend of certainty and apprehension, of earnestness and put-on — the details hardly matter.
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