Tracey to go

Ullman's new HBO half-hour comedy series, Tracey Takes On . . . (Wednesdays at 10:30 and in reruns throughout the week), isn't the ideal vehicle either, but it's as close as she's come so far. It's an improvement over The Tracey Ullman Show, her cult-fave Fox series from the late 1980s (currently showing in syndication on Comedy Central). As on that show, Ullman shows off her versatility with a diverse spectrum of recurring characters, but this time she doesn't have the strictures of a fledgling TV network: commercial breaks, low budgets, and the need not to offend anyone.

Not that Ullman is ever impolite; it's just that she and her stable of 10 writers are wickedly witty, naming a women's celebrity golf tournament after Nancy Kulp (Miss Jane Hathaway of The Beverly Hillbillies), or having a rich woman give leftover canapés to the homeless because the Bible says, "Cast thy crostini upon the waters." Ullman, who's also adept at playing men, creates a gay flight attendant who remembers the bathhouses of the '70s less than fondly, as "one big gay chicken soup with dumplings."

Since her move from England to the United States 10 years ago, Ullman seems to have been quietly observing everyone she's met in shopping malls, airports, and movie sets. She has the instincts of a journalist, and her reportage is devastatingly accurate. Like Peter Sellers, she's uncanny in her ability to inhabit completely the personas she assumes -- changing her face, her body, her accent, her movements, transforming broad caricatures into particularized characters. Unlike Sellers, when she's not in performance mode, she has a personality of her own that informs her work with a refreshing humanism.

For all her bemusement at human foibles, Ullman remains an earnest idealist who roots for the underdog. If she seems to enjoy playing sinners and blowhards, like macho cabbie Chic, faded actress Linda Granger, or snobby, Tina Brown-like magazine editor Janie Pillsworth, still, she finds them less dangerous than pathetic, trapped by their own vanity and hypocrisy. She finds even more sympathy, however, in the likes of shy college student Hope Finch and, most movingly, Chris Warner, who wishes that she and her partner, pro golfer Midge Dexter (Julie Kavner, a longtime collaborator who created the voice of Marge Simpson on Ullman's 1980s Fox series), could openly express their love on TV, the way straight athletes do.

Then there are the characters who occupy both ends of the spectrum -- notably, Jewish matron Fern Rosenthal (a character who first appeared, like many of the others, on Ullman's previous HBO specials). Sure, Fern is a materialistic, bejeweled gargoyle, but her heart is in the right place. (The British Ullman has an astonishingly firm grasp on Fern's Yiddish-inflected, "Long Guyland" diction and hand gestures.) The medical-benefit gala Fern stages, an "all-singing, all-dancing, all-kosher Wild West spectacular," sums up her blend of eager social responsibility and garish, kitschy grotesqueness. At the last minute, Fern's fête threatens to collapse: a cure has been found! She wails, "It's so great for you but what about me? My event is in the toilet. Oh God, why me?" Her sensible husband, Harry (L.A. Law's Michael Tucker), suggests they throw the party anyway, then tell the guests the good news at the end. As he argues, "Because they cure a disease, my baby should suffer?"

Each episode of Tracey Takes On . . . is organized around a theme (for the first three episodes, the themes were romance, charity, and nostalgia), but her continuing theme is the glorious messiness of human relationships. She's prodigious enough that she can explore this idea from all sides at the same time; there's more than enough Tracey to go around.