Customer Reviews

Huff - The Complete First Season

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This and Weeds are the most entertaining shows on television. Hank Azaria is just incredible and the only person who could play Huff. Oliver Platt is an absolute comic genius and I am madly in love with him. He is in a class by himself and deserves his own 5 stars. The way the whole family interacts is so fascinating and complicated and keeps me wanting more. I have watched the whole first season again just because I can't get enough!!! Bring on season 2.

Whenever people talk about the great shows pay cable has to offer, they always talk about HBO. Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Deadwood... Showtime never gets a mention, despite such great and innovative programs such as Dead Like Me, Jeremiah and now: Huff.

With Huff, like all their shows, Showtime manages to make a show with conflicted, real characters without resorting to graphic sex or violence. The language is still as harsh as ever, but it's nothing you probably wouldn't hear in the course of a day if you were in these situations.

Even if HBO gets all the press for their sex and violence, Showtime has another winner with Huff. Great stories, wonderfully real characters who - gasp! - make mistakes, amazing acting... Craig Huffstodt and Hank Azaria are two different people who happen to look and sound a lot alike, I must say. Paget Brewster is completely believable as the harried housewife and who would have thought Blythe Danner could be unlikeable?!

Give this show a chance. The storylines don't resolve at the end of one episode, the characters strike realistically and behave much as you'd expect while you're hoping and praying they won't be that self-destructive.

And hey, Bob Saget plays a drug-addicted former sitcom star in one episode. It's almost worth the price of the set alone. ;-D

I love Sopranos, Six Feet, etc., but I consider "Huff" the best show on television. Hank Azaria is great as usual, but the performances given by Blythe Danner and Oliver Platt are superlative, both deserving of "Best Supporting" Emmys.

With the price set at $25 (with a $25 rebate if you subscribe to Shotime), the DVD set is a great way to get acquainted with "Huff."

The First season of Huff is an addicting & well done show. It is up to par with other great cable TV shows like Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck, & Weeds. It features a superb cast including, Hank Azaria, Paget Brewster, Blythe Danner, and Oliver Platt. The show has great mix of dark comedy and serious drama centering around Craig Huffstodt's (Hank Azaria)
life as a psychologist and his family & friends. There were a few weak storyline moments in the beginning of the season but the actors made it work and the season keeps getting stronger right up to the shocking finale! There are also fantastic guest appearances by Lara Flynn Boyle and Swoosie Kurtz.

I'm about 2 episodes away from finishing my dvd set. It's been fun. I'd heard so many good things about it, and I know it's been an Emmy nominee for various reasons so I went ahead and ordered it since in Australia we don't get it (only got it in the last week around midnight showing).
Hank Azaria is great as I thought he might be as the lead as a psychiatrist Dr. Craig 'Huff' Huffstodt. That's basically what the show centers around - his work life (where he is dealing with a patients suicide), his family life (great wife, interfering mother, turbulent teen son) and his own feelings about all of the above.
This is a funny show, serious and moving. I really recommend it if you are a fan of a darker comedy with great story lines. To be honest, I cannot stand his friend who is played by Oliver Platt. He is the only negative for me. He is arrogant and cocky, but the other characters are fantastic (especially Blythe Danner - Huff's mother).

This show prides itself on presenting characters who not only speak their minds but also articulate their feelings with courageous (or sometimes catty) candor. This makes the program compelling and endearing, if not quite true-to-life. It's rather like the best of Bergman's b&w '60s dramas, which for me resembled O'Neill's STRANGE INTERLUDE: people voicing non-communication in a language not familiar to me, while their actual thoughts were spelled out at the bottom of the screen. Surely few Americans could expose their thoughts in such spoken frankness, I imagined back then.

An advantage of this narrative method is that we become engaged in the characters at several complex levels; hence the compelling nature of the series as a whole. It's also nice to see that a creative force behind THIRTY SOMETHING before this HUFF project has grown up enough to treat elders as something more complicated than the shrill dufuss parents who got blamed so often for the main characters' problems. The commentary says they wanted Huff's in-laws to illustrate a good marriage, but they couldn't resist replaying the "parents' affairs in the past" card that had cropped up with Mel's "good marriage parents" in the anniversary episode. In any case, it's nice to see Blythe's bridge friends aren't dismissed as a coven of geese.

The series prides itself in dodging cliches--mid-life crisis affairs being one that threatened to flirt with predictability but pulled out in time. The brainy son is involved in another minor plot knot of this nature, about peer pressure; it, too, is resolved in a surprising and pleasing way, though one might expect some sort of mean-spirited retribution from the other kids. Frankly glad not to see them again, but they were a dark force that could make for an unpleasant plot development.

The yin and yang of the series are Huff the Compassionate (to a fault) and his best friend, the master of self-destruction and amoral pragmatism (is it redundant to say he's an attorney?). The in-our-face intimacy with this jerk (including toilet paper use) is sometimes hard to take, raising in me at least the same queasiness I felt with the gamblers' impulsiveness in Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT. By the last few episodes, however, these plot points appear less arbitrarily sensationalistic.

And by the time one reaches those last three programs, admiration and caring have been established for the bitchy mother, her institutionalized son, even the ever-skeletal Ms. Doyle (who never looked more beautiful and genuinely vulnerable than in her final un-mascara'ed scenes), and the entirety of the climactic final episode. That season ender is relentless!

Huff is another shining example of why cable television is better than regular. The first day we meet psychiatrist Craig Hufstodt, known as Huff to his friends, a teenage patient shoots himself in Huff's office. Stricken and guilt-ridden Huff turns to his family's support to get him through this troubled time. Huff's family is composed of his wife Beth, a party planner who seems more concerned with her career than her family, his mother Izzy (played by the always excellent Blythe Danner) who lives with him and his wife and whose antagonistic relationship with Beth is reason enough to watch the show, and his son Byrd, who Huff accurately describes as "14 going on 40." Rounding out his support system are his best friend and lawyer Russell (played by Oliver Platt in an increasingly over the top and hysterical fashion) who is a misogynist with a drug, booze and debauchery problem, and his brother Teddy, a schizophrenic mental patient who Huff often visits.

This show is full of twists and turns and you never quite know what's going to happen next. It leaves you wondering what the significance is of the homeless Hungarian man who seems to appear as if from nowhere and wondering if Huff will ever get his life sorted out. Platt and Danner shine in their supporting roles and I've never seen finer work from Hank Azaria than in his role as Huff. Others to look out for: Lara Flynn Boyle as a manic depressive patient who goes over the edge and Swoosie Kurtz as Beth's mother. I find the show enthralling and engaging and would definitely recommend it to the same crowd who goes for Nip/Tuck and Melrose Place.

We are currently watching the reruns anxiously awaiting the second season that starts first week in April. We really enjoy the series, The casting is great. Keep up the great work.

Huff belongs in the field of classy, brilliantly-written dramas that sadly never get much of an audience. Where other TV shows falter with their ridiculous scripts and sub-average acting, Huff is a quiet achiever with outstanding dialogue and characters. After each episode, you feel satisfied having watched one of the best, most rewarding shows on TV, if not the best.

Dr Craig Huffstodt is pyschiatrist who is possibly a little jaded with both his clients and the world, until a 15-year-old patient of his, Sam, commits suicide in his office. The event shakes up Huff's existence and the show explores how he deals with the tragedy, and with the everyday dramas involving his often aggresive wife, Beth (Paget Brewster), precocious son, Byrd (Anton Yelchin), intrusive mother, Izzy (Blythe Danner) and schizophrenic brother, Teddy (Andy Comeau). Not to mention his old friend, Russell, a boozing, cocaine-snorting and hilarious lawyer brilliantly played by Oliver Platt. And, of course, Hank Azaria in the title role is perfect.

As is too often the case, Huff sadly wasn't picked up for a 3rd season, but that's no reason not to enjoy what it was.

What a shame for Showtime to have canceled this show. If Weeds goes, so, too, goes my subscription. With HBO cornering the market of "smart, interesting" shows, you'd think the powers that be at Showtime would have protected and nurtured one of their own. Take a look at the celebs who popped in and did some of their best work (and this includes season 2). Of the excellent main and recurring characters, Oliver Platt's Russell was a fascinating glimpse into a sharp mind combined with a self-destructive bent (I have known an attorney who partied like the dickens and kicked *** at work the next day so this wasn't too far a stretch) and Blythe Danner was a revelation of subtlety and nuance. I could listen to her voice all day. The ep. where she helped her best friend, Lois, as she flipped through an old photo book... or the one where she sat with Teddy for the first time in years... Shame on Showtime.