I was watching the fairly funny trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man who lives with a crude and belligerent teddy bear he’s had since he was eight:

And I realized it reminded me of FX’s show Wilfred, and not just because both the movie and the show feature adult men who take bong hits with their imaginary friends:

Both Ted and Wilfred are squarely in the tradition of Harvey, the 1950 classic about Elwood Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) a likable potential alcoholic who insists that his best fried is an invisible rabbit of that name (a remake was in the work three years ago but seems to have foundered). In that movie, Elwood’s family considers having him institutionalized or receive medical treatment that will make him stop seeing Harvey, but ultimately decide that they would rather have his kind, imaginative self than a normalized shell of a man. But they have a sharper edge than Harvey does—Ted and Wilfred both cause genuine problems in their human friends’ lives other than making them appear odd, and the show and movie appear more willing to treat these lingering attachments as a sign of real pathology. In that sense, they’re also a somewhat way of moving beyond the valorization of manchildren that’s been something of a staple of pop culture for the last five or six years. These men haven’t just coasted charmingly along. There’s something specific holding them back, and it’ll require a difficult, unpleasant decision to reckon with it.

Wilfred, which premiered on FX last night, strikes me as an odd combination of Harvey, Pineapple Express, Donnie Darko, and…maybe Old School, or some other movie in which a fussy and neurotic male protagonist is at least temporarily liberated by acting wildly out of control. I tuned in because I’m interested in the trend of unmotivated male protagonists, and I wanted to see if the show had something new to say in that vein.

It does, in that Elijah Wood’s Ryan is clearly established as depressed, rather than simply a slacker. We first meet him printing out a suicide note (clearly labeled as the third revision of said missive) and looking like Frodo post-Mount Doom but pre-Valinor, as if maybe he had gotten a haircut and was still trying to hack it in the Shire as a gainfully employed hobbit. The problem is, we don’t really have a clear idea of why Ryan’s so depressed, why he’s so terrible to the sister who is trying to help him find a job, or what dreadful thing he’s been through to make hanging out with a horny, scatological, pot-smoking personified dog look like a better alternative to figuring out how to be a plausible adult.

The thing that makes the show work for me to the extent that it does is that the show seems aware of its own untenable premise. “Wilfred, how is this going to end?” Ryan asks his new dog friend after a day of smoking weed, humping waitresses (“Do you always feed your dog nachos?” “No, but he worked out today.”), stealing a closet’s worth of cannabis plants, and defecating in their neighbor’s boots. But some of the crassness of the show just feels like it’s reaching, like when Ryan’s sister declares of a delivery she performed earlier in the day “She wasn’t Asian American, Ryan. She was real Asian. I had to do so much slicing and dicing down there, it looks like a goddamn Benihana.” Wilfred probably shouldn’t try to be Louie, since I’m not sure it has a sense of the truths it wants to tell in the same way Louis C.K. does. It’s better at the moments when it’s more genuinely strange, like when Wilfred gets anxious about whether his real owner will come to reclaim him, and when the show emphasizes his non-humanness. Whether it can make that oddness a strength, rather than falling into derivative weakness, remains an open question.