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In IFC, ‘F’ also stands for fun

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TELEVISION CRITIC

While television drama tends to concentrate on a few subjects (crime, disease, family dysfunction and combinations thereof, sometimes involving aliens and/or monsters), comedy can be about anything at all. This coming week, the Independent Film Channel, not adhering religiously to its name, offers three new unpredictable series, two British imports and one straight out of Brooklyn.

“Ideal,” one of the imports, premieres Sunday; the pun contained in its title is the one obvious thing in this strangely peopled but finely observed downbeat farce about a pot dealer and the people who pass in and out of his messy apartment. Huge and hugely disheveled actor-comedian Johnny Vegas (“Bleak House”) stars as Moz, a man of large appetites but little ambition (and even less hygiene), a subsistence-level pusher who mostly recycles drugs confiscated from other dealers by his best friend, a police constable. (Like Mary- Louise Parker’s character on “Weeds,” he doesn’t deal hard drugs or sell pot to kids, which gives him baseline acceptability.) The comedy of despair and dissolution comes more naturally to the British than to Americans somehow -- it might have something to do with the Blitz or our own fear of being contaminated by squalor. From the two episodes available for review, it’s difficult to know what sort of show it means to be -- there are realistic domestic details, yet there is also a man in a mouse mask -- but it has finished five seasons in Britain, and a little research reveals it will be surprisingly eventful for a series about people who spend a lot of time stoned.

The other British show is “The Wrong Door,” a science-fiction-themed sketch comedy that starts Tuesday night as part of what IFC has described as a “programming destination designed to appeal to a younger male audience,” which is to say that they’ve gone into the Adult Swim business. A giant robot destroys a city while searching for its keys; a young woman dates a tyrannosaurus, who does not integrate well into her life. (Computer-generated animation is everywhere in the series, although, given the budget, it tends to look a little behind the times.) There is no stock company, but familiar recurring faces include Matt Berry, of “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” as a billiards-playing magician; and Alex MacQueen from “Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire” as the Simon Cowell figure in a spot-on “Idol” parody called “Superhero Tryouts.” As with most sketch shows, it’s hit and miss, and as British sketch comedy goes -- a noble line that includes “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” and “The Catherine Tate Show” -- it is something less than first rank but funny enough often enough. The humor is predominantly adult, by which I do not mean sophisticated.

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Also coming Tuesday is the strange and splendid “Food Party,” which most simply said is a cooking show with puppets, but also a cooking show as might have been directed by Michel Gondry. Its star and prime mover, 5-foot Thu Tran, is a 2005 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art who is also a talented glass blower (and dedicated food blogger), and her collaborators here have similar art school credentials. Their show is full of youthful energy, but in its cardboard-and-glitter aesthetic and the front-and-center fakery of its special effects, it also recalls older works: the films of George Kuchar, of Guy Maddin and of Red Grooms and Rudy Burkhardt, and also “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

Lasting 15 minutes an episode, “Food Party” had a previous life on cable access and the Internet, and the six new episodes made under the higher-budget aegis of IFC do not violate their homemade spirit. The nearest thing to it on TV is Adult Swim’s “Saul of the Mole Men,” although that is a model of traditional narrative by comparison. In one episode, she marries herself; in another she gives birth to a pie containing a kitten that will later (I think) murder her other children, who are discovered to be full of cherry compote and candy severed thumbs. Her pals include an ice cream cone, a cigarette-smoking baguette, a lecherous ear of corn and the devil. Life is dangerous, it seems to say, but ultimately delicious.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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IFC series

Where: IFC

When: “Ideal,” 8:30 p.m. Sunday; “Food Party,” 8:15 p.m. Tuesday; “Wrong Door,” 8:30 p.m. Tuesday

Ratings: “Ideal,” TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under 14); “Food Party,” TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under 17); “Wrong Door,” TV-MA-LS (advisories for coarse language and sex)

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