Confession: "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" caught me almost completely by surprise. It doesn't broadly parody soap operas, and it isn't the sort of flamboyantly "controversial" sit-com that one has come to expect from Norman Lear; which is to say that "Mary Hartman" doesn't signal its comedy in any of the usual ways…. "Mary Hartman" has its awful jokey spasms, as when a character is called a "prevert" … but when the residents of Fernwood are so involved in themselves that the laughter comes leaking out of their self-absorption, it's the most subtly, disconcertingly funny show ever to appear on television….

The loopiness of the characters is treated with genial matter-of-factness … and that is what makes the show so liberating, not the "frank" subject matter. For nothing would have been more tiresomely predictable than a nightly farrago of abuse and hurled dirt. Lear has gone as far as he can go (at least I hope he has) with the almost Homeric sarcasm of "Maude" and "All in the Family," and the gentle, laconic absurdity of "Mary Hartman" shows…. What "Mary Hartman" takes from the soaps is the sense that the camera is another character in the room, indeed that the camera is the most observant character of all.

And what is that camera attentive to? Not sin, really, but the discovery of sin: embarrassment. Embarrassment is the experience of being trapped in one's own lies or, even worse, discovering that one is inadequate in dealing with society's demands….

The nihilistic edge to "Mary Hartman" is that though the characters are trapped in those soap-opera rooms, the viewer is always aware of the chaotic world outside. Mary's knocked-out quizzicality seems almost a response to, and a comment on, all the pounding action that is on prime time before 11; she's been so battered by the violence on "Hawaii 5-0" that a mass-murder in her neighborhood just doesn't connect with her feelings.

What does connect with her feelings is sex, or rather, the lack of it. Mary feels sorrowful embarrassment not for something she's done, but for something she can't bring herself to do: masturbate. The bedroom scene in which she confessed to her husband that she doesn't masturbate, that she's never been able to masturbate, wasn't shocking: it was sad, achingly sad. When her husband nervously changes the subject, Louise Lasser's Mary sighs, "I can't do it and you can't talk about it," and the line was charged with the pain of disconnectedness, and it was like watching a spacey American "Scenes From a Marriage." It was a piercingly tender moment and one didn't have to endure hours of schematic plotting, studied drabness, and deadening Bergmanian sobriety in order to reach it.

As in "Scenes From a Marriage," the center of the narrative is a perplexed woman who finds the scaffoldings of her life giving way….

So far, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" is loose and fitful, ham-handed at times, and often too close to the edge of Carol Burnett burlesquerie, but it has verve, affection, and a loving attentiveness to the nuanced banalities of everyday talk, and in its best moments the comedy reveals the raw nerves of love's loneliness. It's not only more entertaining than "Scenes From a Marriage," it's better art.