The Agony, Comedy of Downsizing

Two faces of unemployment.

Credit television with embracing social issues that the movie industry usually avoids like halitosis. “Hidden in America,” for example, is a nice little film from Showtime with a strong performance by Beau Bridges as a laid-off factory worker who has been downsized nearly into oblivion.

It’s a gloomy, if ultimately feel-good portrait of a member of the jobless middle class. Although that would seem a contradiction in terms, the destitute victim of circumstances in this case wears a sheen of reality. Bill Januson (Bridges) is an earnest family man who sweated 17 years on an assembly line, ultimately earning $16.25 an hour, only to lose the job he prized to automation, spend his savings on medical care for his dying wife and see his young son and daughter sometimes go hungry when he can’t make enough money to properly feed them.

Although his family is often famished, Januson is too proud to accept charity. “I am not a bum,” he insists glumly, hoping to buff his self-image. The people he has to convince in addition to himself, though, are his kids, ages 9 and 11.

Downer.

It doesn’t have to be like this, for the popular new CBS comedy “Cosby” has a different take on corporate downsizing.

Missing no meals or laughs is Hilton Lucas, the 60-ish hero played Monday nights by Bill Cosby. Whereas Januson anguishes, seethes and ties himself into knots over his plight, Lucas seems almost blissful since his ousting in a mass downscaling at the airline that employed him for 30 years. His obsession with life’s prickly minutiae--from leaky plumbing to problems with dry cleaning to getting a cab--eclipse what one would expect to be the much bigger frustration of being unemployed and having no priority higher than grumbling.

When someone mentioned in the premiere that he’d lost his job, Lucas snapped: “I didn’t lose my job. The job was taken away from me. I know where it is.”

The line earned a sizable laugh. Since then, however, corporate downsizing and the premature retirement it imposes on many healthy, able and willing members of the work force have earned hardly any attention from “Cosby.” Lucas is merely a homebody, at once bemusing and irritating his wife, Ruth (Phylicia Rashad), with his constant tinkering and muttering, and getting under the skin of her best friend, Pauline (Madeline Kahn).

As if shielded by a thick cone of plexiglass from the fiscal and psychological hurts of being jobless, Lucas is nit-picking his way through the TV season, seemingly untouched and unfazed by the jobless premise of the series that orbits around him. He’s an amusing semblance of Andy Rooney--cranky about life in general, but essentially impenetrable when it comes to real emotion.

Unlike Bill Januson, whom we meet as a widower trying to feed his kids on his minimum wages as a fry cook at a burger joint, Hilton Lucas has a wife who brings in income as co-operator of a flower shop with Pauline, and the couple have no children at home to support or nurture. Moreover, “Cosby” is a comedy whose purpose is to make you laugh, which it often does, not project angst, which “Hidden in America” often does.

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Yet it is possible for comedies to convey something of real America and still be funny, as, for example, ABC’s “Roseanne” proved for years--the working-class Conners once even having their electricity shut off during a financial crisis--before sliding off track this season by having the family win the lottery and join the gaudy nouveau riche.

“Cosby” is based on a British comedy whose older, grayer, brittler male protagonist, in contrast with Cosby’s younger, sturdier Lucas, appears to be of an age generally associated with rocking chairs and retirement. Not that Lucas is a bona-fide shut-in himself. He did have one job interview that went bad, and last Monday found him working briefly as a security guard, a position he ultimately fled with Ruth’s approval.

She had been urging him to quit all along, reinforcing a sense that downsizing and one less paycheck have created no urgency in the comfy Lucas household.

In contrast, the middle-aged Januson finds himself in a crippling pinch when he quits one menial job for a potentially better one that immediately falls through. Despite his determination to work (even as a busboy and a window wiper at a carwash), the future appears bleak.

By this time we’ve already seen him come up $4 short in the grocery line, fall back on a free clinic for treatment of his sickly, undernourished daughter, Willa (Jena Malone), and be chastised by his angry son, Robbie (Shelton Dane), who cuts school to do odds and ends for spare change.

And we’ve also seen Januson’s panic and desperation set in.

To say nothing of the rage and guilt that sometimes overwhelm him, the humiliation of ultimately having to rely on a food bank, and the waves of inadequacy he feels when comparing himself with Willa’s kindly, well-to-do doctor (Bruce Davison), who also happens to be her best friend’s father.

Peter Silverman’s teleplay sinks a little deep into the moist turf of the doctor’s own self-doubts. Yet the emotions from Januson and his children are especially genuine, Bridges is quietly moving and Martin Bell directs without a trace of false sentiment or manipulation.

That you feel ardently for the Janusons is a testament to good filmmaking. That “Cosby” creates comedy from a related scenario is part of the irony of television.

* “Hidden in America” can be seen at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. “Cosby” airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).