Kera Bolonik

Now Burroughs returns with a new memoir, “Dry,” which begins where “Scissors” left off and is already hitting bestseller lists and garnering strong reviews. The book begins when Burroughs is 24, a flourishing, self-made advertising executive whose support network is made up of best friend Pighead, a kindly investment banker dying of AIDS; his drinking buddy Jim, an affable coffin salesman; Greer, his tightly wound colleague; and his constant companion, Dewar’s Scotch whisky. For a person whose youth was one endless stream of unpleasant surprises, drinking provided an escape hatch for Burroughs, even though his allergy to alcohol required him to choke down Benadryl before getting loaded. Similarly, advertising proved an ideal career choice for him, despite his lack of schooling, because, as Burroughs explains, it “makes everything seem better than it actually is. It’s an industry based on giving people false expectations. Few people know how to do that as well as I do, because I’ve been applying those basic advertising principles to my life for years.”

As the “Leaving-Las-Vegas-esque” drinking binge that opens “Dry” is a testament, however, the bottom of that hatch would inevitably start to fall away. Greer stages an intervention and the advertising agency sends him to the rehab of his choosing. Burroughs opts for the Proud Institute, a gay-and-lesbian facility in Minnesota, where he expects to find “a discreet, Frank Lloyd Wright-ish compound shrouded mysteriously from public view by a tasteful wall of trimmed boxwood trees. Spare rooms, sun-drenched, with firm mattresses and white 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets.” In this respect, his awakening proves as rude as the stark fluorescent lighting and the tasteless mush they serve up in the cafeteria.

After 30 days at Proud, Burroughs returns to New York a sober man, his job and friends awaiting him, delighted at the newly lean and clean man they see. Burroughs takes his recovery seriously, throwing himself into his work with renewed vigor, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and outpatient therapy, even as he commits the ultimate no-no: getting involved with an active crackhead, a dashing Southern trust-funder named Foster.

But it’s a sobering reality that puts Burroughs’ sobriety to the ultimate test. When Pighead’s health takes a deathly turn, Burroughs no longer sees a reason to stay dry. He relapses, and though he stays gainfully employed in the advertising business, it takes him two years to return to A.A., where he will recover once more. Burroughs has been “dry” ever since.

I met the author on a sultry June afternoon in New York at the Corner Bistro, a West Village joint as renowned for its juicy hamburgers as its hard-drinking denizens. Burroughs was just wrapping up his book tour, and was thrilled to return home to his partner of four years, Dennis Pilsits, and their two French bulldog puppies, Bentley and Cow-Cow. After six years of sobriety, he assured me that being in the Bistro threatened him not at all, though he recalled having gone there many times, and regularly buying bottles of Scotch at the liquor store just around the corner. As we feasted on cheeseburgers and guzzled Diet Cokes, Burroughs talked about sitting for hours in basements and bars — the underworld for alcoholics both active and recovering — and the perils and pleasures of drinking and drying out.

Your childhood was so chaotic, and you arrived in New York at 23 with practically nothing. What coping mechanisms, besides drinking, did you use to get by?

I didn’t have really any survival skills except my instincts. I don’t talk about it in “Dry,” but I declared bankruptcy when I was 23. I got myself so heavily into debt with my credit cards because I did not have a sense of any fiscal responsibility. I had racked up in one year $63,000 on cocktails at the Odeon (a restaurant in TriBeCa) on AmEx. That’s a lot of cocktails, and that was just one place.

Do you believe people can be predisposed to alcoholism? Your dad was an alcoholic.

I think that a lot of alcoholics tend to be very obsessive. I’ve always had certain tics. Alcohol for me was all about pouring my drink in my favorite Santa mug, taking a sip, looking at it. It itched my brain that the level of the glass had gone down from the sip. I’d have to fill it up again. Same thing with smoking: I would smoke. I’d hate it, so I’d put it out and light another one. Four packs a day. I couldn’t stand to smoke them down. I think obsessive behavior is definitely genetic. And I think alcohol, like anything, can be learned through your parents. I don’t know if alcohol-ism is genetic because it’s a man-made substance. It would be like having a genetic predisposition to CD players.

One of the first things you talk about when you’re getting sober is your feelings rushing back. Were you conscious that you were drinking to obliterate your feelings when you were in your early 20s?

Yeah, I was fleeing. I was really ashamed of my past, the way I was raised. It felt like it was the same rush you would get driving a sports car through a tunnel at a really high speed. It was just go. I never knew what was going to happen next. I never knew who I’d meet or where I’d end up. I had absolutely no sense of responsibility or reality. To me, when I was drinking, it was all about the now. It was a complete escape.

You describe a bender in the opening of “Dry,” when you and Jim start out at the Cedar Tavern the night before a big meeting with Fabergé, a major client of your firm. You could’ve so easily gotten home by 11, and all of a sudden it’s 4:30 a.m. and you’re at the karaoke bar — what happened there? Why couldn’t you extricate yourself?

I really had no control over it. That’s how it was every night for me, although I’m proud to say I never did return to a karaoke bar. But it was always something. I would plan to drink only until 11 or 12, but it would never actually happen. The few times that I didn’t drink for a night, or alcohol wouldn’t have the desired effect of numbing, I’d be overwhelmed with emotions, usually grief, and it was just really upsetting. It freaked me out because I felt like a wreck inside, like my structure was rotting and alcohol was sort of the glue holding me together. In a lot of ways, I felt like it was the only thing allowing me to function. In fact, it was the opposite. I was able to function despite it.

But what happens to that grief when you get sober? Don’t recovering alcoholics find sobriety dredges up a lot of pain and anxieties, perhaps more than they were aware of having before they started drinking?

I think a lot of recovering alcoholics can act so adolescent because that’s pretty much when they stopped growing. Whatever age you pick up the alcohol or drugs, you stop all the introspection. Maybe you get maudlin sometimes, or dwell on your childhood, but it’s not a lifestyle about furthering your spiritual or intellectual growth. It’s really about running and hiding and avoiding and playing. You definitely feel like you’re an adolescent when you get sober. You have so many feelings all at once, and you don’t know how to deal with them.

That’s the only reason “Dry” exists. It was never a memoir. I wrote it totally for me because I just didn’t know how to even live. When I got out of rehab, I thought, what the fuck do I do with all these hours in the day? When you get out of rehab, they tell you to go to a meeting. Well, a meeting is only 60 minutes or 90 minutes at most. What about the other 22 hours of the day? It was just horrible to all of a sudden feel different emotions at once: manic with excitement and then crushed with sadness and then horrified and then ashamed. I definitely found out some things about myself that were horrible. But I also found out some good things: I am very optimistic, which I was when I was a little kid. Being raised in a chaotic environment where something incredibly unexpected would happen — all of a sudden, a new patient would move into the house, or my mother would have a huge psychotic episode, and my whole world would turn upside down — I learned that everything can change. If everything can change, it can change for the better. I lost that when I was drinking. I became really bitter and dark. When I stopped drinking, that was back, full force.

How did your social life change after you got sober?

My relationships were more real. Obviously if you’re not drinking, if you’re just wired on caffeine, you know what you’re saying, and you’re going to remember it. One of the big surprises when I got sober was how hard it was for me to have sex, to be intimate. I didn’t know that I’d find that a problem. When I was drunk I was uninhibited. Sober, I was paralyzed, terrified of any intimacy. Any joining of sex with love was impossible. I had to figure out, what is this about? I realized it was a major thing left over from my Bookman days, when sex was a currency. I didn’t understand it. It was awful.

You had to reinvent sex, in a way.

I still to this day have to work on it. That’s one area of my life that’s not all shiny and together. It’s still hard for me.

What happened to the people you met in rehab, like Foster, the crackhead with whom you were infatuated? And your English roommate, Hayden?

Foster and I didn’t stay in touch after he moved, but he sent me a couple of e-mails over the years. Last I heard, he was enrolled in some kind of trade school, allegedly sober. Hayden is in the U.K. He started painting and showing in galleries in London. I have one of his paintings. He got it together. Everyone else I went to rehab with, over the years, I just heard horror stories about. You have to really want sobriety. You have to be very ambitious. You have to want it as much as you want a new career. It’s a career change in every way.

How old were you when you first checked into rehab?

Thirty. I’d been drinking for 11 years. I’d been sober about two years before I relapsed.

You relapsed as your best friend Pighead was dying. Did it feel like a temporary fix?

I didn’t really have the foresight. I was just thinking about immediate gratification. I did not want to be present for what was going on at all. I used to live in fear of relapsing when I got out of rehab because I’d been brainwashed as if it were a thing that could happen, an external force. Relapse, relapse could be just around the corner, be careful. What are your relapse triggers? A whole sort of gun-and-violence feeling, like a holdup. It’s not a holdup at all. It’s an absolute decision.

When you first went into rehab, were you ready to be dry?

The first time, I didn’t have really any other relationships beyond Pighead. He was everything to me, so all of a sudden that’s gone. I did not have skills and the network of support that I would have needed to be sober and I kind of slipped away from A.A. I didn’t have any reason to stay sober, I felt.

What did you do when you started drinking again and ran into people from your A.A. meetings?

I used to buy liquor from two different liquor stores in the neighborhood because I would buy a bottle of Dewar’s every night. I didn’t want to buy it at the same place because I felt like an alcoholic, but I figured every other day is a little easier. Sometimes I was already drunk when I’d go out to get my liquor. I can remember going to the store on Second Avenue between Ninth and 10th streets and seeing someone from A.A. as I was walking back. The person was crossing the street and looking at me, and I recognized in their eyes that they knew exactly what was in my bag. I’d obviously gained weight. I bloat up; my face gets really big and round.

How long was your relapse?

Probably two years. I got sober in 1997. I was obsessed with alcohol when I got out of rehab at the Proud Institute, obsessed with how many days I had sober, and how many days it would be until I had a year sober, and how many days left until I had two years. It was on my mind all the time.

Writing helps tremendously. The only time in my life I haven’t written is when I was drinking. Writing is what keeps me tethered. It keeps me aware. I can’t hide from myself when I’m writing. It fills the time, and because of what I write now, which is all nonfiction, I’ve got to have things to write about and that’s gonna have to be what I’m thinking about.

But what really got me the second time was alcohol poisoning. It really felt like life or death. I could not sleep because my heart would startle. That absolutely terrified me. I felt the full force of it like I had never felt before so I have a very healthy fear of and respect for alcohol. There are times where I think, oh it would be nice to have a glass of wine, because Dennis enjoys drinking like a normal person and really appreciates certain wines, but it’s never actually like craving.

You can have bottles of wine in the house and not feel tempted?

Totally. I never feel worried that I’m going to drink it. I don’t feel unsafe with it in the house.

Do you miss anything about drinking?

I don’t regret any of it. It was a wonderful experience, as terrible and as life-threatening as it was. To be in your early 20s in New York City making too much money and having a career that demanded play to a large degree and to be a drunk was fun. Alcohol is not like crack or cocaine or heroin in that it is a lot slower. I also figured it was OK to be an alcoholic, because I was high-functioning, so I could get away with it. Some people can be an alcoholic and get away with it. But alcohol will take you down in the end — your liver shrinks, and your liver cells die and you’re not able to metabolize the volume of alcohol you once were, and you require more alcohol to get that same feeling. And once you reach that point, the buzz is gone, and you suddenly have to drink in order to function. Sometimes I miss the obliteration, the mindless, absolute spontaneity of it. But there’s so much more that I don’t miss. And the things that I have now that I enjoy, I enjoy more than I enjoyed in those moments.

Like what?

Over the weekend, after the book tour, Dennis and I were in our house in Northampton, Mass., with our new 10-week-old puppy and our 1-year-old puppy. Dennis is in the kitchen cooking, the TV is on but it’s muted, NPR is playing on the stereo, all the windows are open, it’s breezy, and there are candles lit, and I was ready to weep with absolute bliss, for the mind-numbing happiness and simplicity of it. And I never could have appreciated that, never. It’s absolutely wonderful.

When you get rid of one addiction, do you take on another one? Do people get addicted to meetings?

Yes, they get addicted to meetings. Some people go once, twice, three times a day. It’s not healthy. Get the fuck out of the basement, get your ass out of the folding chair and get a life. That’s the kind of recovering alcoholic I never wanted to be. You’ve just got to push yourself to do things you wouldn’t normally do. I was lucky in that I had writing. I could totally channel everything into writing and if I wasn’t writing, I could read. I have a lot to catch up on because I have no education. I never had a chance to relax in my life because I’d been working, panicked about not having money, because I’ve lived in squalor when I was growing up so I’ve always been very panicky about being homeless. I never had a chance to relax and read a book. I don’t think I read a book until I was 24. I read a lot now that I’m sober.

Did you read other drinking memoirs before?

No. Not since, either. I don’t know why. It’s not a genre I’m interested in. I don’t read memoirs. There are too many of them. (Laughs.) I like to read my women’s novels: Midwestern women having coffee, talking about their husbands and their kids: That is what I love to read about. Elizabeth Berg. Or A.L. Kennedy, on love and obsession.

Do you think it is possible to carry on a sober life?

I’m having one now, and I am hoping it continues. I never say never, but I don’t see myself drinking, even if I were having a crisis. I have a network of people. Even when bad things happen now, I am a lot happier than I was. The thing is, if it weren’t easier and better, I wouldn’t be sober. It’s that simple. If I had to really work at it that hard, I wouldn’t be able to do it, because I am lazy and pleasure-seeking.

Do you have any indulgences now that you’re not drinking?

I chomp nicotine gum. I’m going to end up with half a jaw.

What do you make of those three old guys sitting at the bar over there, hunched over their highball glasses? They’ve been here since I got here at noon.

I know the comfort of a highball at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. It happens in the dark. It is blindingly bright outside, and yet in here, it is like pupil dilation-land, and the music is slow jazz and the walls are brick and it’s been unchanged. Nine-11 did not happen in this room. People don’t die in this room. They are in another world. The fact that it is Wednesday in New York City in the summer is irrelevant in here.

The funny thing about bars is that they are a lot like little A.A. rooms. You walk through a door, and you enter a place that’s just outside of society. One place serves cocktails, and one is full of people who are bitter that they don’t get to have them anymore. But they’re very similar. There are a lot of regulars here. I came here a few times when I was drinking, before I’d go out to the Odeon. It feels profoundly familiar. Those guys over there are probably here for the night. They’ll have a burger at 8, go home and have a few more drinks and then pass out and do it again.

A show about theater demands as much drama behind the scenes as on the stage, and “Smash” won’t disappoint: There are betrayals, divorces, complicated adoption stories, sordid seductions, dreams fulfilled and quashed. We meet songwriting duo Julia Houston (an understated, lovable Debra Messing) and Tom Levitt (the equally terrific Christian Borle) who’ve been enjoying a successful run on Broadway and London’s West End with their breakout show “Heaven on Earth,” and who’ve vowed to take a year-long breather because Julia is pursuing an international adoption. It’s a promise quickly broken when Tom’s ambitious, crush-worthy new assistant, Ellis (Jaime Cepero), suggests the team do a musical about Marilyn Monroe — a concept that has previously failed on the Broadway stage (meta data: In 1983, a Marilyn show with a happy ending was a critical and commercial disaster) despite the subject’s perennial popularity — and it’s a challenge they can’t resist. For Julia, it’s about creating a work that honors a subject who said in an interview before she died “Please don’t make a joke out of me.” Julia says, “There was just something about her, how much she wanted to love and be loved … Reminds me of a saint. I don’t want anyone else to do her.” For Tom, it’s the prospect of writing the baseball number about Joe DiMaggio.

The duo swears they’re going to write just one song. And maybe record that song with an ensemble cast member from “Heaven on Earth,” Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty). Which is fine except that Ellis secretly films it with his phone to share with his mother, who posts it online, and the recording goes viral.  Julia’s husband, Frank (Brian d’Arcy James, a Broadway musical actor in his own right), predicted this would happen — he knows songwriting is Julia’s gateway drug to a full-on production, and that means possibly losing her for at least another year to a show in development, and to her gay partner, Tom, to whom she can seem more closely committed than to him. (Not to worry, this is not a setup for a Grace Adler/Will Truman redux dynamic, or even Grace/Jack McFarland. Julia and Tom are far more realized — neither goofy, nor batty, nor undermining.) Will this adoption be shelved?

Broadway producer Eileen Rand (Anjelica Huston) is eager to get involved with the show-in-progress, now that her pet project  — a revival of “My Fair Lady” — is stuck in escrow, along with her money, due to an acrimonious divorce battle with her rich soon-to-be-ex-husband. She sees in the biographical musical an opportunity to assert her independence in the theater world. But she needs to lure away some of the talent he’s locked into place, in particular, the “My Fair Lady” director, Derek Wills (Jack Davenport), a pompous, indisputably talented English lothario — he reads like a Broadway Simon Cowell, an incongruous misstep that I can only hope was the result of network notes — who hates Tom (the feeling is mutual), and who believes Marilyn’s bleak track record speaks for itself and wants to stick with the original plan.  But “Marilyn Monroe,” Eileen argues, “is an American Eliza Doolittle.”

This “My Fair Lady” trope carries through at least the first two episodes: Is Marilyn an American Eliza Doolittle, and do the creators want to take one on and mold her into a Marilyn? Indeed the Marilyn project is a very clever entrée into the insular realm of Broadway musical theater, allowing us to see the subject’s biography bisected, and follow her evolution from Norma Jean to Marilyn Monroe, not only through the musical itself, presumably, but through the experiences of the two hungry actresses vying for the title role. With her blond hair and hourglass figure, and a vague air of tragedy with her perpetual singledom and hardworking background, veteran ensemble actress Ivy Lynn appears a no-brainer for the iconic Marilyn and she is desperate to lead a production (and is played to perfection by seasoned Broadway actress Hilty — also in need of a breakout role). Karen Cartwright (McPhee), the other actress in contention, is a very green Midwestern brunette beauty with an incredible voice (and the only person at the open audition not dressed as Marilyn — she sings Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” seeking to evoke her romantic innocence). She’s the Norma Jean. Or, if you will, Eliza D. Unlike Ivy Lynn, Karen has a boyfriend, Dev (Raza Jaffrey, who last starred as a cuckolded husband in the English answer to “Sex and the City,” a deliciously overwrought BBC series called “Mistresses”), as well as well-intentioned provincial parents (real-life couple Becky Ann Baker, Lindsay and Sam Weir’s mother from “Freaks and Geeks,” and Dylan Baker, perhaps best known as the pedophile in “Happiness”), as a safety net — Dev encourages her to follow her dreams; her parents gently suggest she shelve them.

The project, even as a work in progress, demands a charismatic star. Tom and Julia have been workshopping the songs with Ivy, who they feel is perfect for the part, and they want to reward her. But with Derek and Eileen on board, they are forced to open the door to other Marilyn options, which is why they’re faced with the unanticipated quandary: Do they want a ready-made Marilyn, who they know can do it, or accept the challenge of a Pygmalion-Marilyn story within a Pygmalion-Marilyn musical? That’s the pilot cliffhanger, presented with a goosebump-inducing closing number, “Let Me Be Your Star,” a cross-edit duet between Karen and Ivy Lynn, as they prepare for the final callback, tracking them from their respective apartments to the their face-off, each singing the story of her plight, until their voices, naive and knowing, yet equally exhilarated and earnest and fervent, converge in a fever pitch: “And what you’ve been needing/Is all here and my heart’s bleeding/Let me be your star!” I guarantee you’ll be genuinely torn.

But even that was funnier than the cold open the week before, following Rick Santorum’s near-victory in the Iowa caucus. Santorum lost to the monotoned Mormon by just eight votes, and his statements on the trail since his rise in the polls must have seemed like belated Christmas presents to comedy writers. Surely Andy Samberg, the goofiest cast member, would let his freak flag fly, right? Instead, Samberg spent five minutes setting up a joke about Santorum’s 100-day, 99-county Iowa campaign, pledging to visit every county in America to beg for votes, even braving the “heavily armed population” of Monroe County, Tenn., that inspired “Deliverance” and the “thousands of angry pillow biters and doughnut bumpers” of San Francisco county. Why? Get ready for the punch line: “This is about the country that has given so much to me and to which I want to give something in return,” says Samberg-Santorum, “so that maybe one day, long after I’m gone, my grandchildren can look me up on Google and find something, you know, different from what’s there now.”

Samberg’s Santorum would’ve gotten more meaningful laughs if he’d just turned up wearing a foamy mocha-latte mustache, promoting the chocolate-frothy caffeinator as his official campaign beverage. Even Jay Leno had sharper barbs (“He lost by only eight votes … You know what’s ironic? He could have won if he’d just gotten the gay vote”).

It’s been that kind of year on “Saturday Night Live.” The Republican presidential field is an embarrassment of crazy-train riches. But the writers have been lazily broad-stroking caricatures of the candidates, and the result has been surprisingly edgeless and increasingly lame sketches. There’s no bite to Sudeikis’ Romney, played as a mere socially inept square. Kenan Thompson’s Herman Cain was a clueless, oversexed black man with dumb luck and box loads of pizza metaphors. “Fences. Jesus. Papilloma. Eyeballs,” is the essence to Kristin Wiig’s Michele Bachmann — exact words borrowed from Wiig-Bachmann’s actual post-Iowa closing statement on the Jan. 7 “Weekend Update” (even the pith of “Weekend Update” anchor and “SNL” head writer Seth Meyers has dulled this year).

The “SNL” writers wrote off Newt and Ron Paul as viable candidates early in the game — surge be damned — so Bobby Moynihan has been left to grin idly in his Phil Donahue wig, when he could have, at the very least, seized an opportunity to spoof Gingrich’s amazing concession speech in Iowa, a study in aggressive passive-aggression, directed at Romney. Why wasn’t more made of Romney’s relationship to Jon Huntsman, a distant relative from a rival Mormon clan — where’s the “Big Love” sketch? At the very least, a “Romeo and Juliet” number with one of Huntsman’s daughters and one of the Romney boys. I’d even take a “Brady Bunch” skit. With each GOP contender flitting away — after Huntsman’s exit on Monday, we might never see two Republican Mormons running for president — so too goes another missed opportunity, the unrealized jokes piling up like stacks of yesterday’s newspapers.

Though “SNL” is not strictly a political-satire show like “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report” — two shows that have had no problem doing both smart and funny work in recent months — it does have a reputation for edgy political commentary, for shaping the national conversation. And while the “SNL” cast and creators often dismiss criticism of the show by suggesting that everyone believes the show’s heyday is when they were in high school, you don’t have to go back far to find a golden age of political comedy. During the 2008 election, the sketch-comedy show was even lauded for being a game-changer: Tina Fey’s entitled, ignorant Sarah Palin (“I can see Russia from my house”) was spot-on, and Amy Poehler perfectly evoked the rage and righteous indignation of her Hillary Clinton, and made viewers appreciate her plight for the White House, her resentment of Obama, her outright hatred for Palin. Neither required too much embellishment — that was the beauty of the sketches, and the performances — and as a result, our hunches about the various candidates were confirmed, through these laugh-out-loud depictions, during an election when so many Americans were sitting on the fence. And so these enter the pantheon of iconic “SNL” political impressions: Chevy Chase’s buffoonish and clumsy Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey’s catchphrase-obsessed George H.W. Bush, Phil Hartman’s white-trashy fast-food-bingeing womanizer Bill Clinton (and later, Darrell Hammond as a cool-headed smooth-talker through Whitewater and Monica), and Will Ferrell’s willfully ignorant playboy Dubya.

“SNL” has had an undeniable impact on the culture, on the way candidates are perceived, and as recently as the last election, it has proven how persuasive it can be — or, at least how it can nudge us in a direction we were considering. And edgy is best left to the professionals, the Stewarts and Colberts. To be fair, that’s not “SNL’s” aspiration or mandate. They just need to make viewers laugh. Because if viewers are laughing, it means they’re listening.

And this is where “SNL” is failing viewers right now, by resting on those laurels of 2008. They’re writing as if, in the words of Vanessa Bayer’s moderator in “Yet Another GOP Debate” sketch from October, “No one is watching, so the stakes are low.” As the race whittles down, and Republicans seem more and more likely to settle for Romney, pens need to sharpen — right now, it is too easy to watch “SNL” on DVR, with a finger on the fast-forward button, searching for a chuckle. Sudeikis is leaving at the end of the season: It’s an opportunity to have more fun with Romney (please let it be Taran Killam). And must we really endure another year of Fred Armisen’s Obama, as a too-calm, emasculated, disempowered world leader? It’s a dreadfully boring narrative thread.

But if these writers had a hard time making the present cast of GOP characters interesting, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be inspired by the next 10 months of Romney and Obama. We expect Romney and Obama to be cautious candidates — but that’s hardly an excuse for such timid and uninspired satire.

So, where is Chelsea, then? Roseanne starred in “Roseanne.” Jerry starred in “Seinfeld.” Louis C.K. stars in “Louie.” Even her caustic pal Whitney Cummings — who barely registered a blip outside of the comedy circuit until this past fall — stars in her eponymous sitcom. Handler appears in only seven of the 13 episodes, cast — by choice, she says — as the conservative Christian sister to her fictional twentysomething alter ego. (Handler claims she was too busy with her talk show to be the sitcom’s star or head writer.) Instead, Laura Prepon (Donna Pinciotti from “That ’70s Show”) plays young Chelsea Newman, ventriloquizing Handlerisms like a white kid reciting a Chris Rock monologue (if only she were savoring the jokes as breathlessly. If only the jokes were so worthy) while Handler’s presence in these early shows underline how flaccid her emasculating quips sound when intoned by anyone but her.

The pilot opens with Prepon’s voice-over, narrating as Chelsea Newman proudly “power-slurps the worm” out of a bottle of tequila to show up the guys at the sports bar where she waitresses. Cut to the county jail, where she spends the night with a bunch of lecherous lesbians from central casting — she’s gotten busted for a DUI. Just as one of the burliest broads starts in on her, she prays: “Are you there, vodka, it’s me, Chelsea.” The Lord Grain Alcohol answers her, apparently, because she’s bailed out by her hugely pregnant, judgmental sister, Sloane — Handler in a mousy brown wig, looking haggard, baiting Prepon with the line “Vodka is not the Lord.” That earns this meh quip: “Are you sure? They’re both invisible and have a hand in unexplained pregnancies.” Onto the sports bar, where we meet the rest of the crew: Chelsea’s best friend and gatekeeper, Olivia (Ali Wong), a petite Korean woman as shrill as a yipping Chihuahua; bartender and one-time-roll-in-the-sack Rick (Jake McDorman); bar back and resident little person (Handler would seem to have a fetish) Todd (Mark Povinelli). Don’t worry, they don’t make fun of his height — he’s color blind [insert sad-trumpet sound here]! Chelsea’s miserly, drunken father Melvin (Lenny Clarke) is, I suppose, Cliff-like in this “Cheers”-less bar, trolling for free drinks, except that Cliff would have been disturbed by his daughter offering her male friends “handies” in his presence.

All of these people are just set decoration for Chelsea’s posturing as a brazen, unapologetic bad-ass. She can drink not like a man, but “two men” — though we don’t witness her getting drunk so much as hear about it (they did take “vodka” out of the show title, after all) — and can trash-talk anyone under the table. Her sexploits in evidence are aborted missions  — in one, she wrestles to top a fellow-alpha sex partner; in another, she interrupts foreplay to attempt to trim the overgrown pubes of a red-headed conquest who repulses her. And, sure, she talks blue, but when more dynamic female characters go dirty, they do so with the searing wit of “30 Rock’s” Liz Lemon, and the cursing conviction of “Dexter’s” Deb Morgan. When she and Olivia boast about popping “lady wood” as they admire the décor of a prospective apartment, owned by a gawky virgin named Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus, who manages to bring in the only bit of funny in evidence), it’s not racy, or shocking, or even ewww-worthy. It’s writers trying too hard to lend an edge to aimless, underdeveloped characters. Which is why the only laughter you hear after all these clunkers comes from the accompanying laugh track. Just like “Whitney.”

Whitney Cummings is at least fully devoted to being “Whitney,” a caustic, often-unlikable woman with a supportive boyfriend and serious abandonment issues. I can even bear, in small doses, “adorkable” New Girl Jess (Zooey Deschanel), in all her sing-songy tweeness. She may not be grounded as an individual, but she is at least fully realized as a character. But Chelsea, that girl’s nowhere to be found. And unless the writers find a way to give us a sense of who she is, why seek her out?

So I am ecstatic that 17 years later, after an illustrious career on the big screen and onstage, Danes has returned to series television to portray someone even more challenging: Carrie Mathison, a bipolar CIA agent gone rogue, on Showtime’s “Homeland.” Not since Helen Mirren’s detective, Jane Tennison — an alcoholic with a messy romantic life — from the BBC’s “Prime Suspect,” has a female protagonist asked us to suspend our judgment for the greater good. Here are smart, resilient women amid a sea of testosterone, ballsier, so to speak, than any of their male colleagues because they have to be, to be heard, to barrel through bureaucracy and egos and sociopathy. But Tennison’s occasional missteps both at home and at work, while frustrating to behold, were forgivable, because she’d secured viewers’ unwavering loyalty from the moment we met her. Carrie is a tougher sell.

During a mission to Afghanistan, Carrie learns that a returning U.S. Marine officer — a POW long considered dead — has been turned by al-Qaida. No one can corroborate her evidence — her informant has been killed — so it’s up to her, and only her, to prove to the CIA that America’s new hero, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is a sleeper cell. As her boss David Estes (David Harewood) says, “There is no bridge [she] won’t burn, no earth [she] won’t scorch” in her pursuit. It’s true. Carrie is single-mindedly focused on her mission — to unmask Brody and stop him from destroying the country — and she will make an enemy of anyone who stands in her way, sometimes, unwittingly, at the risk of national security. She’s a trees, not forest, kind of gal.

Estes proves to be an enemy. He’s a disbeliever, mostly out of spite (and, as it is later revealed, career-driven motivation, in bed with the crooked Dubya-like vice president) — he had an affair, years earlier, with Carrie that led to the breakup of his marriage and the breaking of his heart. But in her rogue mission, she betrays her one ally, her former boss, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), when she sets up a clandestine surveillance operation in Brody’s home and then attempts to placate her mentor with a seduction (they, too, had a brief fling years earlier). While watching Brody through the surveillance cameras, she becomes obsessed with her subject and starts pursuing him in the flesh. Not only does she end up sleeping with the enemy; she falls in love with him, too. It’s hard to say which is worst of all, but this might qualify: None of her colleagues, not even Saul, knows she’s manic-depressive — the disclosure would cost her her security clearance, her credibility, her job. Too bad — she’s in it now. Integrity, schmintegrity: Her instincts, her ability to connect the dots in this splattery-smudgy-redaction-filled constellation, are better than anyone else’s. Too bad no one will hear her — her bipolarity reveals itself after she survives a bombing but endures a complete breakdown in the aftermath, rendering her a Cassandra. The events she is trying to warn everyone about, the connections she’s been drawing between Brody and al-Qaida, fall on ears deafened against the temporarily insane.

Patinkin’s Saul is easier to like; he’s a patient papa, forever exasperated with Carrie, but he goes to the mat for her and her insights time and again. Why? Because he knows she’s right. Because she is bold enough to continually put herself on the line. And so too is Danes — she will not choose to win your heart the easy way. Now more than ever, with those big, wise doe eyes, she has imbued a difficult character with complexity and intelligence and a touch of the crazy, and gets you to love her in spite of yourself.

I thought I was doomed to a life of desolation, but then I found salvation on the local college radio station, with a DJ named Brenda, whose playlist introduced me to a host of what could be described as proto-emo (preemo?) bands: the Smiths, The The, Bronski Beat, Tears for Fears. I didn’t always fully grasp the meaning of their lyrics — some of the work was rich with homo subtext — but I felt a genuine psychic connection to their anguish, their longing and their morose revelry. Finally, my misery found company.

That was 25 years ago. Today, my partner of seven years and I are sorting out our plans for this weekend’s Gay Pride festivities in New York, and I’m reminded, as I wistfully listen to these songs, how I never imagined I’d one day make a home and plan a family with a woman I love. I credit shrinks, of course, and the changing times — if only we’d had gay-straight alliances in schools, or “Will & Grace” and “The L Word” on TV — but most of all, I am grateful to these bold musicians who provided the soundtrack to those difficult years in the early and mid-1980s. I offer, with highly personalized liner notes, my coming-out mix tape — a veritable K-Tel anthology of adolescent high drama. These anthems allowed me to claim the label I had not yet acted upon; they emboldened me to pursue the one thing I thought would eternally elude me: requited, consummated same-sex love.

1. “Mad World” by Tears for Fears (from “The Hurting,” 1983)

I was in the eighth grade, still wearing a headgear, growing back my then-thin hair after a bout of trichotillomania (a compulsion to pull out your own hair) and finding perverse comfort in my genuinely felt, but never fully realized, suicidal ideations. I literally wanted to die after going to a classmate’s bat mitzvah, when a girl from school caught me glancing at her in her Gunne Sax mini-dress. It was as if her beautiful, deep-set eyes were pointing at me, yelling “J’accuse” for leering at her; they knew the truth of who I was, every lurid thing I could and would ever conceive of. My face blushed fire, as if I were copping to a crime I didn’t even know existed. This whole exchange took place in less than 10 seconds; I replayed it in my head for years.

Being the Carrie White of our school — friendless and under virtual house arrest — provided me plenty of time to self-eviscerate about that moment. When I heard the clanging opening of the synth xylophone on this track while listening to my radio Walkman a few months later, I knew I’d found my alienation theme song. Roland Orzabal crooning, “I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad, the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” Nearly 20 years later, Gary Jules would cover the song (which largely found its audience when it appeared in “Donnie Darko”). He made it sound even more devastating by swapping the synthesizer for a single piano and his somber, understated voice.

2. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by the Eurythmics (from “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” 1983)

The Brits have cornered the market on white soul singers, from Dusty Springfield to the rehab-averse Amy Winehouse. But 25 or so years ago, Annie Lennox and Boy George (see No. 3) added another identity-bending layer: drag. They weren’t the first, not at all, but I can pinpoint the moment I saw the “Sweet Dreams” video as if it were a historic event. The sight of Annie Lennox — her shocking red Ziggy Stardust-like crew cut and smart tailored suit, standing in that futuristic boardroom, wielding a pointer and moving in a visual staccato like a dominatrix robot — was the most subversive thing I’d ever seen at the age of 12. And then there was that otherwordly, gorgeous voice booming from her succulent, if severe, lipsticked mouth. That image of Lennox was as aggressive as punk — her face-off between masculinity and femininity as exquisite as it was dangerous. But whereas punk was determinedly ugly, Lennox armed herself with fierce beauty as a weapon and dared to invite everyone to take a cold, hard stare at her.

3. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” by the Culture Club (from “Kissing to Be Clever,” 1982)

And then there was Boy George, who playfully blended black eyeliner and pale foundation — more makeup than I would own in my lifetime — and wore a Hasidic-like black fedora over his long black semi-dreaded locks (suggesting a head full of payis) and a long white tunic emblazoned with Hebrew words. What a mind fuck! Maybe it’s because my mother saw the video with me and immediately fell in love that I found him to be more accessible, clownlike without being creepy. I didn’t equate the gender bending of Boy George or Annie Lennox with homosexuality, but I did intuit that something most definitely queer was going on. And it was gorgeous and glamorous.

4. “I Wanted to Tell Her” by Ministry (from “With Sympathy,” 1983)

When I was 14, the only lesbian and gay people I knew in Oak Park, Ill. — and in the world — were either only rumored to be so (i.e., my gym teachers and Liberace) or were the class creeps (few of whom, if any, were actually gay). But my freshman year of high school, I glimpsed the connection between coolness and lesbianism, if only for a minute during art class, when I was easel neighbors with a senior who would boast about sleeping with her best female friend. “Nancy” wore a lot of black, fancied herself a punk rocker, aspired to be the next Diane Arbus, was perpetually stoned and quickly became my idol. She made lesbianism seem less daunting, so much so that I wanted to tell her my most unspeakable secret. It was the first time I even considered juxtaposing the word “lesbian” with the phrase “I am a.” But then Nancy had an affair with her 40-something-year-old male English teacher, whom she later married, and I discovered the meaning of a new word: “poseur.”

5. “The Soul Mining” by The The (“The Soul Mining,” 1984)

This song, and indeed the entire album, was the score for the pit of my sophomore year despair. I had started to date — and subsequently grew weary of and mentally unengaged with — guys and became utterly, and stutteringly, speechless around a steely-eyed junior who edited the school literary magazine. It was time for a more careful evaluation of my sexuality, and that meant withdrawing from everyone — except my shrink. The The’s Matt Johnson could evoke the darkest of moods with the music alone: It sounded like he was performing from the bottom of an empty well, or in a desolate tunnel. But it was the lyrics that pulled me in and gripped me for years: “Something always goes wrong when things are going right. You’ve swallowed your pride to quell the pain inside. Someone captured your heart like a thief in the night, and squeezed all juice out until it ran dry.” Yep.

6. “I Want the One I Can’t Have” by the Smiths (“Meat Is Murder,” 1985)

Morrissey is the laureate of morose revelry, and he was my demigod. At 15, I let my “mentality … catch up with [my] biology” by acknowledging my same-sex infatuation with a fellow traveler on a summer trip to Israel, the first of many inaccessible girls to capture my heart. The girl couldn’t have been straighter — or nicer to me, for that matter. I swore I spied a flicker of hope when she told me she was going to Barnard the next year, thinking she might have a sexual discovery of her own. But she had a different epiphany: She upgraded her Judaism from Conservative to Modern Orthodox.

7. “Smalltown Boy” by the Bronski Beat (“The Age of Consent,” 1984)

I don’t know what’s eerier: Jimmy Somerville’s castrato-like voice or the narrative he lays out in this song, about a young man cast out by his parents and gay-bashed by a guy he fancies. The video terrified me so much I didn’t come out to friends until college — though I soft-launched a disclosure to my Jewish liberal parents when I was 15 by telling them, “There’s a pretty good chance I am experiencing bisexual tendencies.” They dismissed it as a phase for more than 10 years.

8. “Gloria” by Patti Smith (“Horses,” 1975)

I’d never listened to Patti Smith until I was about to go to college. By the time I heard that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not [Miss Smith's],” I was ready and eager to find that sexy chick who was “humpin’ on the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter” and be like Patti, who claimed not to care about the “people [who said] ‘beware.’ The words are just rules and regulations to me. Me!” The proto-punk goddess provided my liberation anthem, which propelled my college quest to find myself, lose the self-consciousness, “[take] the deep plunge” and “put my spell on her,” whoever she might be.

The song drove me to my first Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Alliance meeting just weeks after being dropped off by my parents at Rutgers to begin my freshman year, and I searched in vain all over campus for that Gloria. I was so eager to test-drive my new lesbian identity that I made out with the first willing female participant I could find, despite my lack of attraction to her. It was as sloppy and unerotic as my high school experiences with guys, but finally, I was on the right track.

When I spotted the Gloria of my rock ‘n’ roll dreams in the dining hall later that year — she was a sophomore English major and aspiring singer-songwriter — I was desperate to take the deep plunge, to validate everything I’d been feeling since junior high as real and true and significant. She was not feeling it so much, not for me, at least. But she would eventually seduce me, two years later, and then, if only for a night, I was assured that this desire could be, if not fully requited, then totally, excellently consummated.

I had no more questions. Except to ask for more.