The H man cometh; Joan Juliet Buck tallies the wounded doctors, disses the sloppy monarch, and salutes the one hero on television this month.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Huff smokes. His mother, a skinny blonde installed in the guest house, is a monster of selfishness. His wife is a rock who hates his mother, his brother is locked up in an institution, his son is a little too sensitive. His best friend is an overweight lawyer who gets down with OxyContin and cocaine and likes to be spanked by a hooker. Huff is Dr. Craig Huffstodt, a Los Angeles shrink in whose office a fifteen-year-old gay patient shoots himself. The fact that this is the third pilot this season to begin with a suicide either indicates a trend or is merely an accident. Any amount of time spent pondering the difference between design and coincidence will put you in the Huff mode of nervous anxiety.

This is what you can call Television of Uncertainty. Huff, the new series from Showtime, is constructed, like The Sopranos, as an extended miniseries, a continuing story rather than episodes. The adolescent who shoots himself in Huff's office sets off a series of lawsuits that create the incidents at what you could call the crossroads of an empty life. When Huff walks down the street, he absorbs all kinds of evidence of human misery, the only relief provided by the sight of the occasional pair of nipples pushing through a

T-shirt, which then send him spinning into guilt. It's a tragic version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a shrink version of Six Feet Under, where madness takes the place of death as life's constant companion. The angst is engaging despite the repeated appearances of a homeless Hungarian composer who endlessly asks Huff for help and may well be imaginary. All this dicing with the edge of madness brings into play the teachings of David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks years ago slid coincidence and paranoia into the acceptable dramatic mix for TV. Certain rules of political correctness are broken, but conventions adhered to: on Showtime, an African-American hooker can bare all, but the wife wears a bra to bed.

Hank Azaria plays Huff; his bird-of-prey profile and worried eyes make him look a little like a shorter version of John Kerry. As his female patients thrash out the tiny details of their fragile problems-one is disturbed because her husband cracks his knuckles-he finds himself saying, "I am sleeping through my life." Blythe Danner is his mother, a part written with gay abandon: she is rude to the maid, mean to her daughter-in-law, a bigot in satin shirts and little cardigans. Horrified that her daughter-in-law is cooking pork for dinner, she says, "There's one thing I'll say for those Jews-their food is clean." By the second episode we meet Melody, a psychopathic patient played by Lara Flynn Boyle, who lunges across a table like an insane reptile to attack the vulnerable Huff. He is already weakened by self-doubt because of the suicide, and gnawed at by his mother's love, his brother's insanity, his son's worrying ...