‘Baskets’: Zach Galifianakis Lets Louie Anderson Upstage Him

Diving into its second season, Baskets — which returns Thursday night on FX — retains its distinctive combination of tedious anti-humor and really enjoyable, emotional stuff. In keeping with star Zach Galifianakis’s perverse sense of artistic integrity, the first episode is a boring road trip, with Galifianakis’s Chip Baskets riding the rails as a morose hobo who hooks up with a bunch of rootless hippie eccentrics, who give him the nickname “Noodles.” (When they meet Chip, he’s eating noodles out of a can.) The high point of the half-hour, even without providing you the context, is Chip’s anti-drug motto: “Noodles doesn’t do needles.”

But things perk up thereafter, especially when Chip’s mother, Christine (Louie Anderson, who won a well-deserved Emmy for this role), is around to gaze soulfully at her son. Or at her TV. Or basically at anything: Anderson is great at soulful gazing, and even better at delivering the show’s lines about the banality of consumerist America. (The show seems to be at its best in an Applebee’s or a Costco.) By the third episode, there’s a subplot about Christine’s new exercise regimen that is at once lovely and hilarious.

Basically, I’ve come to realize I want to watch a show about Christine, not Chip or his weasely brother, Dale (also played by Galifianakis). But that’s not the show Galifianakis has created, so I’ll keep checking it out for its incidental pleasures. A lot of Baskets’s best humor is totally random, as when the wind picks up a plastic trash bag and blows it near Chip’s head; he grabs it and blows his nose in it. I don’t know why, but I laughed hard at that.

Baskets airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on FX.