• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Today

A new series coming to Hulu on Wednesday is a very proficiently produced show -- looks good, sounds good, tells its story well, and the acting is on the money.

But at the same time, watching Episode One of the show -- titled “Sunny Nights” and premiering Wednesday on Hulu -- made me feel awful.

The show is about desperate people at the end of their ropes. The show is dark, violent and seedy.

Hulu is billing the show as a “dramedy” combining elements of drama and comedy. I saw none of the latter. There was nothing sunny that I could see in “Sunny Nights.”

The most desperate of the show’s desperate characters is a man named Martin Marvin (Will Forte, above photo), an American whose dreams of entrepreneurial success bring him to Sydney, Australia, to try and find backers for his new spray-tan product he calls Tansform.

His business partner is his hard-partying sister, Vicki (D’Arcy Carden, above photo). While in Sydney, they become entwined with a gang of hardened criminals, who understandably wreak havoc on their lives.

So why did they come all the way to Australia to seek their fortunes? Because Martin pines for his ex-wife, Joyce (Ra Chapman), who moved to Sydney after they separated, and he hopes to win her back.

Thus, Martin is desperate on two fronts -- financial and emotional. This is difficult for him to manage, and difficult for us -- or at least me -- to watch.

Throw in threats to his very life, and Martin is carrying quite a bit of baggage for a show that is billed as partly humorous, which it is not.

If Martin’s name, Martin Marvin, is some kind of a takeoff on the name of the old Looney Tunes character, Marvin the Martian, then the point is made.

In “Sunny Nights,” Sydney may as well be Mars for Martin, especially when he and his sister become acquainted with the city’s dirty underworld.

Anyone who saw Will Forte in the movie “Nebraska” and “The Last Man on Earth” on Fox knows what a fine actor he is. He is no less fine in “Sunny Nights,” and so is everybody else. 

I freely own that I watched only one episode of “Sunny Nights.” As I have written here many times, I am the king of watching one episode of new TV shows for the purpose of writing these blogs.

For me, watching Episode One of “Sunny Nights” was a depressing experience. I may never get to watching more of it, but having said that, I hope Martin can find a way to turn his life around and that the criminals who are victimizing him get their just deserts.

“Sunny Nights” starts streaming on Wednesday (March 11) on Hulu.