Spiked

It was hard sometimes to tell whether the talk show within HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" was intended to be any good. Few of the actual in-show sketches, or what little we were shown of them, were any good; they seemed to just allow Garry Shandling another opportunity to do that thing where his smile becomes a grimace so subtly you got to where you couldn't tell them apart.

All this by way of introducing "Talkshow with Spike Feresten," starring a former writer for David Letterman, which debuts tonight at midnight on Fox. Where, Feresten reminds us repeatedly, there's little or no expectations for an actual audience, just a random spate of losers who suddenly lost the gumption to keep pressing buttons on their remotes.

And this is precisely the show they deserve. It's something of a marvel Feresten made it to the air at all: Last May, at Fox's fairly disastrous upfront, he may have been the lowest point in a roundly criticized show: The response to his stand-up monologue would actually have been improved by crickets chirping. That he's on the air after bombing so thoroughly in front of advertisers, who would therefore know better than to throw ad money at a show like this, suggests that Fox could give a crap or is just clueless about late-night programming (this is the network, after all, that gave the world "The Chevy Chase Show").

"Talkshow," ostensibly, is a parody of talk shows, so a bit entitled "How to do man-in-the-street comedy" seems like it's supposed to point out how cheap this sort of thing is. And certainly, there are some noxiously unfunny sketches, but then, there also appear to be moments in which Feresten is actually trying to get a laugh. (That he's unsuccessful is beside the point.) So, as best as I can tell, Feresten is an anti-comic in the tradition of Neil Hamburger -- whose whole shtick is alienating audiences -- but, in the end, he lacks the courage to follow through on that gambit and therefore looks all the more miserable. When the show returns from a lame filmed sequence to Spike's hearty laughing, it's hard to tell if he is genuinely deluded into thinking the bit was funny, or that's the only way he can think to disguise his flop sweat. And certainly, it doesn't help that his mannerisms suggest a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of his mentor Letterman.

Bits with celebrity guests -- Andy Richter tonight; Mary Lynn Rajskub in the future (provided there is a future) -- are likewise underwhelming and anticlimactic, despite the guests' relative gameness.

Feresten has already written his obituary, in tonight's vaguely amusing opening exploring the notion of a "Fox late-night curse," which resulted in atrocities such as the aforementioned "Chevy Chase Show." A narrator grimly asks, will that curse continue with "Talkshow?": “The answer is, almost assuredly so.� And there you have it.