Channel Surfing: 'Portlandia' - NYTimes.com January 6, 2012, 1:30 pm The second season of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen's rigorously lo-fi comedy "Portlandia" arrives on IFC on Friday night riding a relentless wave of hype. Not many shows this small-bore - six half-hour episodes in the first season, expanded to 10 for Season 2 - get this kind of attention, with late-night guest spots, a red-carpet New York premiere (for the second season!) and a tour, which comes to Brooklyn and Manhattan on Jan. 20 and 21. Does the promotional effort correspond to the show's actual popularity? The series premiere last January drew a measly 236,000 viewers according to Nielsen, though that number grows to more than a million when you thrown in replays and DVR and online viewing. Here's the statistic IFC really cares about, though: according to figures from the network, around 70 percent of the "Portlandia" audience is in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic. What is that audience really getting, though, besides a shared sense of being in on the joke? Ms. Brownstein and Mr. Armisen's game is to skewer the pretensions and smugness of the advanced Portland lifestyle - eco-friendliness, enlightened consumer culture - without openly mocking the young people who move there in search of that life, despite its pieties, and who might want to watch "Portlandia." However old you are, it should always feel like someone just a little older than you is being made fun of. Consequently there's a mildness to the show that keeps it from being as funny as it should. Being twee and understated and generally silly isn't an indefensible position - it worked for "Flight of the Conchords," a much funnier show - but you need to demonstrate a dark side, a willingness to pull your viewers up short and implicate them in the madness. "Portlandia" always backs away, letting us off the hook with a visual gag or a chanted catchphrase. The other problem with the show - and it's one that's uncomfortable to talk about, given the earnestness of everyone involved - is that it exposes the shortcomings of Mr. Armisen and Ms. Brownstein as performers. He has the comedian's chops and professionalism born of a decade on "Saturday Night Live," but as an actor he doesn't do anything to move the "Portlandia" material beyond its sketch-comedy roots. And at this stage Ms. Brownstein, a much-loved musician, is not much more than an enthusiastic amateur on camera. Luckily for IFC, quite a few 18- to 49-year-olds appear to identify with that.