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Dec 12, 2010 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

Carrie Fisher has lived an extraordinary life. Her likeness has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. Paul Simon has written songs about her. Her second husband revealed that he was gay after they had a child together, and five years ago, a gay Republican operative died in her bed. The daughter of 1950s showbiz couple Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, whose marriage ended in scandal, Carrie Fisher has been addicted to drugs since her teens and was diagnosed as manic depressive when she was 24 years old. In her one-woman stage show Wishful Drinking, premiering Sunday night on HBO, Fisher addresses all these topics with wry humor, turning this recipe for a tragic legacy into fodder for laughs.

The show was developed from Fisher’s 2008 autobiography of the same name. She’s a witty, charismatic performer who’s self-deprecating but doesn’t wallow, and at a tight 75 minutes, the show never lulls. The highlights are her Hollywood 101 segment, where she traces the tumult in her life to the instability of her upbringing and her parents’ various failed marriages, and the Star Wars segment, where she rails against the innumerable ways George Lucas has merchandised her Princess Leia character over the last three decades.

Fisher was 20 years old when Star Wars became a surprise worldwide phenomenon in 1977. It was only her second film and her first starring role. Though she would star in the franchise’s two blockbuster sequels and attain icon status among fanboys, she never became a leading lady in film, aside from her role opposite Chevy Chase in the 1981 bomb Under the Rainbow.

The Star Wars rants in Wishful Drinking, where Fisher ridicules George Lucas and curses him for ruining her life, are hilarious. She’s been goofing on Star Wars since she hosted SNL in 1978, but that was the era when Johnny Carson alone ruled network late-night, and irreverent cable comedy series were nonexistent. It’s difficult to imagine an actress with such intelligence and candid humor, drug habit or not, being cast aside so easily in today’s celebrity climate where Kardashians and Situations with nothing to say are continually given platforms.

Onstage, Fisher builds a fun rapport with her audience and utilizes a variety of visual aids, from a large chalkboard of her family tree to clips of her parents in films and newsreels. The transitions of those stage visuals to TV are sometimes clunky and betray the theatrical atmosphere. Some of the archival footage is a recent addition for TV and is revelatory, but when Fisher performed the show on Broadway last year, it had a runtime of 2 hours 20 minutes. As funny and entertaining as this television version is, there is the sense when it ends that there could have been much more.

Wishful Drinking will air on HBO through December. www.hbo.com

Author rating: 8/10