Jim Carrey is re-teaming with his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director, Michel Gondry. The pair has been given a green light for a new half-hour comedy called Kidding, in which Carrey will play an actor named Jeff, who is beloved throughout America for playing Mr. Pickles, “an icon of children’s television, a beacon of kindness and wisdom to America’s impressionable young minds and the parents who grew up with him.” So it sounds like Mr. Pickles is a lot like Mr. Rogers in our IRL canon. But because this is a prestige TV series directed and executive produced by Gondry (a duty he will share with Carrey and Jason Bateman, among others), Jeff will experience “a slow leak of sanity as hilarious as it is heartbreaking” as he tries to balance his lucrative brand with commitments to his family, which happens to be crumbling around him. Carrey has a strong history of playing men who are humorously yet agonizingly losing their grip on reality (Eternal Sunshine, The Truman Show), so Kidding sounds like a hand-in-glove fit for the actor.
