'Samantha Who?': Get to know this sitcom — now

[Brian Damage]

Here's hoping you're not asking yourself Samantha Who?
Granted, no one could blame you if you have as much trouble remembering Samantha as she has remembering everything else. Thanks to the strike, early December was your last shot at this sweetly comic fable and its superb star turn from Christina Applegate as an amnesiac trying to recover her memory and remake her life. In an out-of-sight/out-of-mind society, that's a terrible blow for a show just starting to make an impression.

Nor does it help that the show's initial impression was decidedly mixed. There was never any doubt that Applegate is giving one of the new season's most endearing and polished performances, one that confirms her as a TV star worth the reckoning. But there was a question as to how long the show could sustain a loss-of-memory gimmick that seemed more suited to a movie than a series.

You can find a possible answer in tonight's wickedly amusing return, which emphasizes the growth that has taken place, not just in Sam, but in the show since its premiere. Losing her past — a past in which she was horrendously ill-behaved — didn't just give Sam a chance to change her life; it offered the same opportunity to everyone around her.

And by allowing the supporting characters to seize that new day, the show has given them more and better things to do.

Take Sam's ex-boyfriend Todd (an appealingly laid-back Barry Watson), who is now free to make new romantic choices — such as moving his new girlfriend (Kiele Sanchez) into the apartment he's illegally subletting from Sam. It turns out to be a bad choice, and not just because it brings the sublet to light and forces Sam into a rental threesome, but at least it's his.

Then there's Dena (the sweetly befuddled Melissa McCarthy), who after a life of inventing friendships is finally in a real one. Even the show's most problematic character, Jennifer Esposito's too-single-mindedly nasty Andrea, has made a few tiny steps forward, as her attempts to corrupt Sam at least have better motives.

The best change, however, has come over Sam's mother, played by Jean Smart — an asset too valuable for any show to waste. A character who began as almost anti-maternal (yearning for her daughter to stay in a coma so she could get a TV home makeover) has shifted into a woman who yearns to be maternal but doesn't quite know how. Indeed, her attempts to repair her relationship with her daughter have given the show some of its best moments and its strongest emotional hook.

With her daughter otherwise occupied tonight, she turns her attention on Dena. "Your mother's dead and my daughter's out gallivanting. You see how we're both suffering?" "Very similar, yeah."

They bond, as unlikely as that may be in real life, because this is a sitcom. And the bonding is funny, because this is a good sitcom.

This season, that's something you don't want to forget.

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