Tracy Morgan’s screen presence depends on a charismatic combination of
the cuddlesome and the volatile, qualities that are most potent when
exhibited at the same time. His most famous role—in “30 Rock,” as Tracy
Jordan, a superstar comedian steadfastly enabled in his
megalomania—showcased his knack for the erratic to the highest degree.
His latest, as an ex-convict on “The Last O.G.” (premièring tonight, on
TBS), shifts the balance in favor of snuggliness. The character, Tray,
is somewhat like a talking teddy bear that sporadically short-circuits.
Somewhat like Paddington himself, he is kindhearted but prone to
trouble.

The series opens in 2002, with Tray above a cast-iron pan, fixing
chicken for his sweetheart, whose name is Shay (Tiffany Haddish). The
grease, seeming to pop into your living room, emits a cozy aroma
redolent with the prospect of domestic bliss, seasoned though it is with
some ancient undertones of crime melodrama. The apartment is in a tidy
housing project in Brooklyn. Hearing a hoot from a street-level drug
dealer, Wavy (Malik Yoba), rise from the sidewalk, Tray waves off the
lady’s objection, casually heads down to distribute some crack,
approaches an undercover cop, and goes away for fifteen years. He
reëmerges, having honed his talents in a penitentiary kitchen, and
Brooklyn is now rife with preening parents stuffing their children with
precious foodstuffs. “I feel like Rip Van Winkle,” Tray says. “And I
don’t know even know who he is!”

Shay has settled into a row house with a white husband, raising twins
whom Tray had not known he had fathered. (Haddish, granted as much
righteous hostility as the genre will allow, is aggrieved and infuriated
by Tray’s reappearance.) Tray finds a job as a barista at Wavy’s fussy
coffee-shop franchise; he settles into a bunk at a halfway house.
Mullins (Cedric the Entertainer), who manages the halfway house, is an
unlikely candidate to shepherd felons back into society, as his
conversation consists exclusively of phallocentric humor and humiliating
quips. At one point, watching with cruel glee as Tray scrubs a toilet,
Mullins observes that the sight is a persuasive and apt metaphor for the state of life. “It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so goddam sad,” Mullins
says.

Watching the first six episodes of “The Last O.G.,” which was created by
John Carcieri and Jordan Peele, I had occasion to feel much the same
about the show, which indulges and evokes melancholy to curious effect.
The story line gathers threads concerning penitence, rehabilitation,
gentrification, racial tension, and filial duty with some seriousness,
only to abandon them. One moment, it seems eager to address the culture
shock of a fish returned to changed waters; the next, it shies away from
trafficking in the clichés that a critique of twenty-first-century Kings County
may necessitate. Plots with the potential to flower into journeys
instead wither into mere capers; intriguing possibilities open doors
that are simply left ajar. “The Last O.G.” can be affecting: in the
fourth episode, Tray goes on Tinder and makes a good match, only to be
sent on his way by a lady who recognizes him as a man still carrying a
torch. The show seems not so much tentative as overburdened, as if
scurrying from one theme to the next, hustling to resolve the week’s
plot and make it back to the halfway house before curfew, in time for a
cheap gross-out joke to lighten the mood.

Tray’s passion for entering his children’s lives lends the show a
coherence it otherwise lacks. A recurring device finds Tray admiring
examples from the kingdom of nature, where whooping cranes mate for life
and the male seahorse carries fertilized eggs in his pouch. (These
segments are a wistful echo of Morgan’s “SNL” character Brian Fellow, an
overgrown sixth-grader with a safari suit and a frothing lust for
zoology.) Tray, to his regret, has not been a nurturing seahorse, simply
an absent father. The protagonist of this sitcom, so far, seems to be
the wacky neighbor in his own life.