Jim Carrey Returns to TV in Showtime Comedy

Showtime has picked up the comedy series Kidding, which will feature Jim Carrey in his first series-regular role in more than two decades.

The half-hour series will see Carrey (The Truman Show) reuniting with Oscar winner Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), who will direct the project. Carrey will executive produce with Gondry, Jason Bateman (Arrested Development), Jim Garavente (Bad Words), Raffi Adlan (The Green Hornet) and Michael Aguilar (I’m Dying Up Here). Kidding was created by Dave Holstein (Weeds, Raising Hope), who wrote the pilot and will serve as showrunner.

In the series, which has been ordered for an initial ten episodes, Carrey plays Jeff, a.k.a. Mr. Pickles, an icon of children’s TV—and a beacon of kindness and wisdom to America’s impressionable young minds and the parents who grew up with him—who also anchors a multi-million-dollar branding empire. But when this beloved personality’s family (wife, two sons, sister and father) begins to implode, Jeff finds no fairy tale or fable or puppet will guide him through this crisis, which advances faster than his means to cope. The result: a kind man in a cruel world faces a slow leak of sanity as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.

“No one inhabits a character like Jim Carrey, and this role, which is like watching Humpty Dumpty after the fall, is going to leave television audiences wondering how they went so long without him,” said David Nevins, the president and CEO of Showtime Networks. “With his Eternal Sunshine partner Michel Gondry on board to direct, we are on our way to a magnetic, volcanic and emotional viewing experience.”