Showtime has announced that Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Catherine Keener (Get Out) has been cast as a series regular in the upcoming Showtime half-hour comedy Kidding. The series stars Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey in his first series regular role in more than two decades and reunites him with Oscar winner Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), who will direct the project.
Keener will play Deirdre, who thanklessly builds all the puppets on the hit children’s show hosted by Jeff (Carrey) while never being allowed to voice them. She struggles to take the simple lessons preached by Jeff and apply them to the darker complications of actual parenting.
In Kidding, Carrey plays Jeff, aka Mr. Pickles, an icon of children’s television, a beacon of kindness and wisdom to America’s impressionable young minds and the parents who grew up with him – who also anchors a multimillion 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.
With a 10-episode first-season order for Kidding, Carrey will executive produce with Gondry, Emmy nominee 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 addition to Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress honoring her performances in Being John Malkovich and Capote, Keener received an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination for her lead role in An American Crime. She earned three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role – for Being John Malkovich, Capote and Into the Wild – and shared additional SAG Award nominations with the casts of each of those films, as well as this year for Get Out. Keener has also received three Film Independent Spirit Award female lead nominations for Johnny Suede, Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, along with two other noms (for the Robert Altman Award) with the ensembles of Synecdoche, New York and Please Give. Additional memorable performances by Keener include Show Me a Hero, Begin Again, Enough Said, Cyrus, Friends With Money and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
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