Paging Dr. Weird

By Sora Song

Pity this is the most we'll get to see of perennially underappreciated character actor HANK AZARIA'S hunky side in his new one-hour television show, !Huff (or should it be !Buff?), which premieres on Showtime Nov. 7. Azaria plays Dr. Craig Huffstodt, a well-to-do Los Angeles psychiatrist whose life revolves around a bevy of people plagued by varying degrees of insanity. His schizophrenic brother lives behind locked doors in a private mental institution. His best friend, a lawyer, asks him to lie under oath. His mother Izzy, a manipulative, acidic and passive-aggressive divorce played by Blythe Danner, occupies the apartment above Huff's garage and makes a sport of tormenting his wife. Then there are the patients. One of them, Monique, is driven to a near homicidal rage by her boyfriend's incessant knuckle cracking--but it has never dawned on her to ask him to stop. So the question is this: What's with the exclamation point in the title? "I asked the same question. I thought it was a typo," says Azaria. "Basically, it's just kind of something that makes you look twice and makes you wonder. It should just be normal, but it's not. That's very much our show."