By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – There’s a major player missing from Tracey Ullman’s season opener of “State of the Union”: Barack Obama. Ullman, who wore out a pair of books kicking former President George W. Bush, takes a pass on the new prez in her third season debut, which airs on Showtime Jan. 25 at 10:30 p.m. New York time. You’d think getting a Nobel Peace Prize while escalating a war should be good for at least a laugh or two. Bernie Madoff, however, gets pasted, as does his wife, Ruth, (played by Ullman) who has been downsized to a small apartment on the outskirts of Harlem, complete with a bare radiator and lots of street noise. That’s paradise compared to Bernie’s new digs. Cut to a correctional facility in North Carolina, where the pope of ponzi shares a narrow bunk with a burly black inmate who clearly has not taken a vow of chastity. It gets worse. Madoff is also blamed for 911, swine flu, and his likeness is included in a Holocaust museum. Sorta makes you wonder if Bernie might have stolen some of Tracey’s dough here in the real world. The half-hour show is a bit uneven. Some gags are top-drawer, others fall flat. Ullman is at her best in a terrific send-up of the political chattering class. The skit unfolds in Rachel Maddow’s make-up room, where Ullman plays Maddow, Arianna Huffington – “I haven’t stopped talking since ‘Morning Joe’” – Meghan McCain, and Rep. Barney Frank. Her Huffington imitation is especially tight: She looks like Huff, yaps like Huff, and reminds some of us why we always reach for the clicker when Huffington appears on screen. There’s also a whack at city slickers who pay big bucks for brushed denim jeans that make it appear they’ve been out digging ditches, putting up houses for Habitat for Humanity, or pack industrial-strength marriage tackle – a new wrinkle on the old codpiece gag. Ullman also brings back her hybrid car, which gets 900 miles a gallon and is so small you could probably drive it with a three wood. For my money, the funniest segment features a woman who suffers from severe internet addiction. She’s monitoring a cyst with an ultrasound app and may post a pic on her Facebook page -- so weird and gross it’s easy to believe it’s really happened. After an intervention by friends and family the patient goes off to a detox facility in Arizona and falls back in love with the pre-digital world. “I want to read books with pages again,” she said. “I don’t want to scroll through life any more.” There’s a message here: America is hooked on addiction and intervention programs. For every American, the show concludes, there’s a staff of four professionals ready to help us regain our footing. All told, the debut is an enjoyable enough half-hour. The second installment in the weekly series is more of a challenge. A story line in which author and famed widow Candy Spelling hires an assistant to wipe up during trips to the toilet is cringe material, though there’s some redemption in a skit about a couple matched up by a Jewish dating service. Things go okay until the dude admits he’s not Jewish at all but instead a lapsed Presbyterian. “How did you infiltrate the data base?” Ullman screeches. “Call the Mossad!” One assumes the Mossad is down in North Carolina, slipping razor blades into Bernie’s grits.
