(Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy. Like Tillstrom, magician’s daughter Shari Lewis was a genius at switching among characters, but as a ventriloquist, she was often a part of the conversation herself, conducted sometimes at breakneck pace. Her technique is astonishing but her writing and characterizations are also first-rate, subtle and unpredictable and full of warmth. (She studied acting with Sanford Meisner.) Lamb Chop is her star creation, quickly changeable, a child and not a child, sweet or saucy, tender or tough as the moment demands; Lewis’ own Bronx roots come through in her. Lewis made her way through local television shows in the 1950s until NBC’s “The Shari Lewis Show” took her national in 1960. In the 1990s, the public television series “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along” proved an Emmy magnet.
Every once in a while HBO will slip something strange into the lineup of shows on which it stakes its fortune your “Game of Thrones,” your “Undoing.” Something arty for art’s sake, something odd for oddity’s sake, like Terence Nance’s “Random Acts of Flyness” or “How To with John Wilson.” They may not bring in large audiences, or dominate the chatter on social media, or prompt multiple stories in the press, but for my money, these unpredictable exceptions represent the channel at its most worthwhile.
Such is John Lurie’s “Painting With John,” an idiosyncratic bagatelle whose second episode (of six) premieres Friday. First known as a musician and an actor, pursuits he was forced to abandon by the Lyme disease that still troubles him, Lurie turned to painting, and this new series, whose title calls back to his 1991 IFC/Bravo series “Fishing With John,” finds him making pictures and telling stories on the unnamed, tropical “tiny island” he calls ho