No Clowning Around

The new series “Baskets,” starring Zach Galifianakis and produced by Louis C.K., which premières on FX this Thursday, is full of things that you don’t see much of on television these days. Its protagonist, Chip Baskets (Galifianakis), is a rodeo clown who makes four dollars an hour and lives in an extended-stay motel. His friend/chauffeur Martha (Martha Kelly, a standup comedian in her first acting role) works as an insurance adjuster at Costco and drives a tan, mid-nineties Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. The two meet for coffee in a gas station. The show is set in California, though not a sun-kissed Apatovian Los Angeles, but instead a sun-blasted Bakersfield, where the most coveted job around appears to be behind the counter at Arby’s, and where one character remarks that the town is pretty, like a “garbage dump.” The tone of the show is as if Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” had been made into a gently surreal half-hour cable comedy.