Jim Carrey to Star in Showtime Comedy Series

Jim Carrey is having a weird week.

A few days after Carrey gave a bizarre, existentially bleak interview on the red carpet at a New York Fashion Week event, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Carrey will star in a Showtime comedy series called Kidding.

Kidding will be Carrey's first series regular television role since he launched his career on In Living Color in the early '90s. It will reunite him with his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry, who will direct the series.

Carrey will play Jeff (aka Mr. Pickles), who THR describes as "an icon of children's TV, a beacon of kindness and wisdom to America's impressionable young minds and the parents who grew up with him -- who also anchors a multimillion-dollar branding empire. But when his family (his wife, two sons, sister and father) begins to implode, Jeff finds no fairy tale or fable or puppet will guide him through this crisis, which advances faster than his means to cope. The result: a kind man in a cruel world faces a slow leak of sanity as hilarious as it is heartbreaking."

"No one inhabits a character like Jim Carrey, and this role -- which is like watching Humpty Dumpty after the fall -- is going to leave television audiences wondering how they went so long without him," Showtime CEO David Nevins said. "With his Eternal Sunshine partner Michel Gondry on board to direct, we are on our way to a magnetic, volcanic and emotional viewing experience."

The news comes less than a week after Showtime renewed I'm Dying Up Here, the stand-up comedy dramedy that Carrey executive produces and on which Kidding creator Dave Holstein is an executive producer. So Showtime is bullish on the Jim Carrey business.

The series has the potential to be very good, since Eternal Sunshine is a consensus pick as one of the best movies of the century so far. But will that matter to Jim Carrey? Does anything matter?

(Full disclosure: TV Guide is owned by CBS, Showtime's parent company.)