When we first saw clips of Parker Posey’s stab at sitcom stardom, the long-delayed FOX offering The Return of Jezebel James, we were skeptical that the sometime high school hazer and incestuous Jackie O impersonator would be able to make the transition to laugh track anchor without diluting her own charms, or worse, becoming really, really annoying. Based on the first two episodes, which are already available for watching and embedding via Hulu (see the pilot above), both of our fears were valid––Posey’s total inability to grasp sitcom comic timing is a big problem, and her flailing attempts to do so strip her of all likeability. It’s such a sad thing to see such a strong actress in a debacle like this, especially just one year after making a really good film which, in a fair and just world, would have sat at the top of her resume until she could get cast in something even better.

But there are sadder things about Jezebel James to discuss…

Jezebel, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino of Gilmore Girls fame, would be completely unfunny even if Posey wasn’t blatantly miscast as the lead, mostly because it seems to have absolutely no regard whatsoever for reality in its situations or honesty in its characterizations. As Ginia Bellafante notes in her review of the show for The New York Times, its disregard for the real world becomes particularly glaring in the show’s explanation for why Posey’s character can’t conceive and must hire her flaky younger sister to bake her bun:

She has been told she has a rare condition called Asherman’s syndrome. Asherman’s comes from having repetitive D and C’s, the kind that often follow miscarriages or abortions, and if you know that tidbit, you’re left to wonder whether we’re supposed to think of Sarah as someone who never paid much attention in sex ed, a woman suffering from her prior mistakes. If so, then the show loses a lot of the feminist credibility that Ms. Sherman-Palladino has seemed to work so hard to attain.

Whoops. I imagine this is just a researching gaffe, but who knows––maybe somewhere in the series’ truncated run, there will be a very special episode where Posey’s character acknowledges her past life as an irresponsible party girl (no pun intended), thus putting her decision to forcibly stabilize her vagrant sister by paying her to be impregnated into *some* kind of context. But I wouldn’t count on it. And the fact that FOX is making this obvious career-low available on Hulu for bloggy dissemination and critique, when they should just allow everyone involved to write it off and move on, is truly criminal.