sitcom
emma.simmonds
In one of the great US sitcoms, Seinfeld, the mantra of the show's producers was "no hugging, no learning". Well, Parks and Recreation - which may end up occupying a similarly lofty place in comedy history - takes the opposite tack. Warm and wonderfully witty with characters and relationships that actually evolve, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur's sitcom also features TV's finest comedy ensemble. This perky, award-winning comedy has taken an absolute age to reach us, considering it debuted in the US in 2009 (where the fifth season has already aired). As with other such imports, BBC Four Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Compile a list of the subjects you thought may be unsuitable for a sitcom, and it will almost certainly include a person with learning difficulties, assisted suicide and an army bomb disposal team.Well all three of those now exist – Derek and Way To Go have just finished their first series on Channel 4 and BBC Three respectively, and on the latter channel last night Bluestone 42, set in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, made its debut. And while the makers may have had a modern-day M*A*S*H in their heads, they have some way to go before reaching that comedy's heights - they don't even Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are oodles of comedy DVDs released for the Christmas market - here's a selection of the best.Dara Ó BríainCraic DealerIn more than a decade of watching him work, I've yet to see the hugely likeable Irish comic doing anything less than a very well put-together and gag-filled show, and this is no exception. Filmed at the Edinburgh Playhouse, it shows him at the top of his form and displays one of his great strengths - interacting with the audience and creating great comedy on the spot from it. He also talks about adult alternatives to Nativity plays, how the modern Irish diaspora is so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Somebody has missed a trick in not promoting Getting On to BBC Two. Where The Thick of It earned its spurs on BBC Four before graduating to a larger audience, and Gavin and Stacey made the comparable journey from BBC Three to BBC One, the sitcom set in an NHS hospital has not qualified for a transfer. It’s a great pity that it has not found a wider audience, because last night’s conclusion to the third series was a masterpiece of subtle revelation and, rarer still for a sitcom, deep humanity. Beautifully crafted by writers Joanna Scanlan, Jo Brand and Vicki Pepperdine, and shot with a lyrical Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind. Depending on which publications you read, you may already be aware that the show is many things: racist, classist, realistic, unrealistic, hilarious, overrated, written by one of the best and brightest young female writers, written by an overprivileged egomaniac. The show won an Emmy this year for outstanding casting for a comedy series (and was nominated for several Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Getting On exists somewhere on the spectrum between Carry On and Samuel Beckett. Set in a hospital ward where mostly geriatric patients are tended by middle-aged staff all with problems of their own, it looks unflinchingly at the great maladjusted edifice that is the Health Service and all who ail in her. And in Vicki Pepperdine’s tightly coiled consultant Dr Pippa Moore it has perhaps the most delightful sitcom grotesque since Malcolm Tucker first started turning the air blue.For this third series it’s all change. The action has moved from a grotty small-town hospital to ward K2 of St Jude’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always either a very good or a very bad sign when my notebook remains untainted by my scrawl when I'm reviewing; either I am too busy enjoying myself to make notes or I'm so unengaged that I can barely be bothered to lift my pen.It was the latter with last night's opener (part one of six) of Me and Mrs Jones, despite the presence of Sarah Alexander, a talented comedy actress, and Robert Sheehan, a very fine dramatic actor whom the camera loves. And also despite the writing talents of Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, who worked on the wonderful Smack the Pony with Alexander, and then wrote Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's a great PhD to be written about why comics are so keen to dress as old biddies, from Arthur Lucan and Benny Hill to Dick Emery and Les Dawson, by way of any number of panto dames to the most noble of them all, Dame Edna Everage. To this esteemed list of comics should be added Brendan O'Carroll, whose Agnes Brown is an astonishing creation, a foul-mouthed Dublin widow whose passions in life are bingo and poking her nose into her children's lives.Mrs Brown first saw the light of day on radio in Ireland in 1992 and then in a series of books. In 2000, one was adapted into a film with, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King, who created Sex and the City. Whereas SATC was set in Manhattan, 2 Broke Girls is located in New York City's less monied, but nowadays more groovy, borough of Brooklyn.The set-up is very much of our times. Max Black (Kat Dennings) works two jobs to make ends meet: during the daytime, she is nanny to Brangelina, the twins of rich Manhattanites Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come home from work. But twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne have done just that, and the result, Roger and Val Have Just Got In, is a thing of quiet beauty.It debuted on BBC Two in 2010 and, given little fanfare by the corporation, still gained a solid and devoted following, instantly hooked on this delicately woven story about Roger and Val (Alfred Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.Yet, just as their own series offer nuggets of mini-genius lying around on a carpet of dross, so this new offering (penned by Simon Nye) sizzled with a potential which one despaired of them ever attaining. Miller plays Read more ...