Shrink on the verge of a mid-life meltdown

Huff suffers from feeling contrived.

Anal retention is not a subject your middle-of-the-road television drama would willingly try on. But Huff (TV One, 9.30pm), the story of fortysomething Californian psychiatrist Dr Craig Huffstodt's mid-life meltdown, is game for most anything.

You had to admire last week's episode for its boldness in taking the most basic approach to its theme of control - or complete lack of it - that permeates every aspect of the good doctor's life. While his retentive patient was desperately trying to stay pure in a soiled world in the most literal sense, everywhere else the metaphorical crap was flying.

Indeed Huff is not a show that could be accused of withholding.

It began with the good doctor witnessing a gay teenage patient killing himself after, on Huff's advice, he came out to his parents. From there it has crammed in a wealth of neuroses in Huff's dysfunctional home life, complete with challenging relationships with long-suffering wife Beth, smothering mum Izzy and an enigmatic teenage son.

Throw in a drug- and sex-addicted lawyer for a best friend, an imprisoned schizophrenic for a brother and you have enough mid-life crisis material to cover half the men of Los Angeles.

Huff, the man, might be ready to call it quits from his frenetic, materialist, emotionally disconnected life in modern America in favour of a long, existential stare into nothing, but Huff, the drama, still wants to have it all.

Made for cable channel Showtime, the show is trying hard to prove its edgy, "this is not nice, safe network television" credentials. But those daring HBO shows, such as Sex and The City, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under are a hard act to follow.

The sexual frankness, nudity, invective and bids for shock value - such as shots of the contents of the colostomy bag in the moving bedside scene - feel as faux as the implants sported by many a Californian citizen.

We learn exactly what goes on at teenage "rainbow parties" or see shots of mum's bum because she hasn't dressed for breakfast. But are such additions there because they're integral to character and plot or because this is a cable show and they can get away with it?

The camerawork is terribly arty. We first see the anal one's face as a distorted image through a waterglass in the doctor's office. The effect isn't so much profound as highly contrived.

Huff is set in the same milieu as Six Feet Under - comfortable, security-obsessed, middle-class Los Angeles - and has the same high production values. It certainly has the best title music and art-house opening credits since SFU but it's nowhere near as searing and cynical as that scrutiny of death and the surreal culture of California.

The creator has said this is a show about "waking up to life". Its message is that merely functioning as a professional, father, husband, brother and friend is not the same as really being there.

Huff's problem is that it's hard to be a good guy in a world where everyone wants to be safe and no one wants to take responsibility, which is so litigious that minor domestic interactions are like plea bargaining and in which nobody is at fault. It's a show with plenty of potential, but so far hasn't pulled off its veering from moral seriousness to playing it for laughs.

Like a lot of the doctor's patients, Huff is making all the right noises and going through the motions but I'm not quite convinced that any real progress is being made.