‘Starved’ for substance

“Starved,” which premieres Thursday night, is a troublesome new situation black-comedy from FX, Fox’s edgier-because-it-can-be basic-cable offspring. The network has lately had some success with original drama in the form of “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me” and “The Shield,” series rich in aggressive dysfunctional maleness -- a quality that pertains here, as well, although ostensibly played for laughs.

“The Other Side of Comedy” is the tagline being used to promote the shows making up its first-ever “comedy block”; in the case of “Starved,” this apparently refers to the side that isn’t funny. Fox famously likes to push the envelope, but sometimes all that gets you is a lumpy envelope.

What makes “Starved” particularly vexing is that it’s at once assured and shallow, accomplished and unconvincing, well-acted and empty. The series suffers from an especially unappealing lead character, played by an actor -- Eric Schaeffer -- who also happens to be its creator, writer and director, and from a wobbly tone that garnishes its central sourness with lashings of sentimentality.

The fact that its unpleasantness is largely intentional -- that it may indeed be the point -- does not make it any nicer to watch. Notwithstanding its unusual milieu -- its four main characters are in various stages of recovery, or lack of recovery, from eating disorders, and belong to a kind of rogue self-help group, “a community of accountability and shame” that runs on humiliating its members -- it is at bottom a retread of “Seinfeld,” whose three-man, one-woman cast, New York setting and obsessive-compulsiveness it replicates.

It takes itself more seriously than did “Seinfeld,” though, which is ultimately not such a good thing.

Schaeffer, whose total control of this project offers an object lesson in the wisdom of a system of checks and balances, plays Sam, a “recovering anorexic” and compulsive overeater; equal parts self-love and self-loathing, he is a commodities dealer, which allows him to live convincingly in a place that has a shower the size of some New York apartments.

The very large Del Pentecost is Dan, a novelist and compulsive overeater, forever rescheduling his gastric bypass surgery; buff Sterling K. Brown is Adam, a bulimic police officer who extorts Chinese food from a deliveryman and then throws it up (on a homeless man); Billie (the especially excellent Laura Benanti) is a recovering anorexic-bulimic singer-songwriter whose much bruited bisexuality may be partially convenient (“My fans like me better gay,” she says) and, in line with male thinking, less fulfilling than she claims. Colonics are also mined for humor.

We are to understand that these characters are not really hungry for food but hungry for love -- we know this because Schaeffer runs a power ballad over scenes of his principals in lonely isolation. “In my sex, I like to include an iota of feeling,” Sam tells Billie, though there’s no indication, in the scenes where he’s having it, that this is so. Self-involved cruelty seems instead to be his style. At times we could be in a Neil LaBute play.

Woody Allen is also a touchstone. Schaeffer is the auteur of several big-screen (and straight-to-video) Age of Irony romantic comedies, including “If Lucy Fell,” which have earned him a cult following somewhat at odds with his critical reputation; as an actor-director-writer, he has some of Allen’s faults -- a tendency to cast himself as hot stuff prime among them -- without his philosophical thoughtfulness or gift for humor. Schaeffer has had some personal experience with addictive behavior, it says in the promotional materials, in case anyone would care to question his authority. (He describes the series as “more than semi-autobiographical.”)

But just because you’ve had an experience doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say about it or are able to articulate whatever interesting thing you have to say. “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, screaming in terror, realizing that you are

At the end of the third episode, in a moment that comes screaming out of left field, Sam suddenly busts out all sensitive, giving Dan a you-are-not-your-sickness speech and telling him, “Just hang in there, you’re doing great, I love you.” I would call it a false note except that nothing else that precedes it rings especially true.

*

‘Starved’

Where: FX

When: 10 p.m. Thursday

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

Eric Schaeffer...Sam

Laura Benanti...Billie

Sterling K. Brown...Adam

Del Pentecost...Dan

Executive producers Eric Schaeffer, Dan Pasternack. Director, creator and writer Eric Schaeffer.