From The Last Man on Earth to Married: the US comedies we're missing in the UK
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Version 0 of 1. With the wonderful Broad City now showing on Comedy Central UK, 15 months after its US debut, there’s hope for fans of American comedy that we’ll eventually get more of the good stuff. To be fair, high-profile shows such as Louie, Modern Family, Parks & Recreation are shown in the UK fairly soon after their US transmission, and it’s the same with some of the little less known, including Archer, Silicon Valley and Inside Amy Schumer, but there are still tons of great offerings absent from our schedules. Here are five we’re hoping will find a UK home soon … The Last Man on Earth Nothing brings out the worst in people like an apocalypse. And few comic actors revel in playing deeply, entertainingly flawed characters as much as Will Forte does. Here, in a show of his own devising, he stars as lonely Phil Miller, apparently the only survivor of a deadly global pandemic. After a year spent fruitlessly searching for fellow survivors, Phil settles in Tucson, Arizona, and slobs out; littering his house with porn and hanging out at a bar with his “friends” (a collection of balls with crude faces painted on, a la Tom Hanks in Castaway). He resorts to cutting a hole in a diving board to turn his outdoor pool into an oversized toilet and filling an inflatable pool with booze – “I swim in it, I drink out of it, there’s really no wrong way to use a Margarita pool.” But when other stragglers appear, including Kristen Schaal and Mad Men’s January Jones, Phil still finds the deck stacked against him, giving Forte plenty of opportunities to show the petty, jealous, devious Manning at his very worst. Fresh Off the Boat A loose and sanitised riff on the autobiography of US celebrity chef Eddie Huang, covering the time his family moved from Washington DC to Orlando in the mid 1990s just as he was hitting his teens. There is some great era-based humour, such as one episode that captures the giddy excitment (and subsequent crushing disappointment) Eddie and his fellow hip-hop and basketball-loving school pals felt over the notoriously bad Shaq-Fu video game. But the show is stolen by Constance Wu as Eddie’s mother, a performer as entertaining as Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep or Modern Family’s Ty Burrell. As it’s the first network sitcom about an Asian-American family in two decades (since Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl), it comes under heavier scrutiny than most shows and, like its characters, it occasionally struggles to find its identity. But with its family appeal as well as Wu as its secret weapon plus a second season on the way this could be a major contender. Nathan For You A bizarre and painfully funny prank/reality show where deadpan Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder attempts to “help” struggling businesses. Armed only with his so-so business school qualifications and a sense of the dryly absurd, Fielder constructs stunts that sometimes seep into the real world – like the “Dumb Starbucks” coffee shop in Los Angeles that made the news last year. The store, looking identical to a regular Starbucks but with the word “Dumb” added to the omnipresent logo, managed to stay open for three days by claiming it was an art gallery and employing the “fair use” parody law. Other pranks include enforcing a “No sharing” rule at a cinema to drive up the food-and-drink takings and trying to drum up free publicity for a taxi company by offering free taxi rides to pregnant women to get a “backseat birth” human-interest story in local newspapers. The show is as smart as it is silly. And it’s very silly. Kroll Show For Kroll Show, which recently finished its three-season run, Nick Kroll (The League) created an entire ecosystem of note-perfect reality show spoofs that fed into each other. Starting with PubLIZity, featuring a pair of ghastly PR agents both called Liz (played by Kroll and the great Jenny Slate, both sounding as if they are regurgitating words rather than speaking them), we then spin off to their pet dog’s plastic surgeon Dr Armond’s show Armond of the House. Armond’s nasty son, Roman, gets his own spinoff, Roman’s Empire, and so on. There’s also Jersey Shore-style nightmare Bobby Bottleservice, whose shows include Ghost Bouncers and Gigolo House. Then there’s Wheels Ontario, the note-perfect spoof of Canada’s long running Degrassi teen shows, where able-bodied new kid at high school, Mikey, is bullied by a student population who are mainly wheelchair users, and given the insulting nickname “Legs”. Not only do Kroll and co-star John Daly play the characters in that show, they also play the actors’ off-screen personas, which leads to them judging an X-Factor ripoff, Show Us Your Songs Commonwealth, where we are treated to such sights as Kristen Schaal (again) in a splendid Die Antwoode spoof. It’s a dizzying mess of in-jokes with pop culture eating itself where everything is fair game. Much of it is impenetrable to casual viewers but regularly quite brilliant if you’re in it for the long run. Married An often brutally unsympathetic look at a marriage that has got to the stage where it’s obvious all the previously cherished dreams and ambitions are never going to come true. Starring Judy Greer (Archer, Arrested Development) and Nat Faxon as Lina and Russ Bowman, we see them living their lives under the constant pressure of disappointment as the show neatly sidesteps cliche by eschewing big dramatic moments. By keeping things realistic it holds back on the comedy: the frayed Judy shouts “Well hit her back!” when one of their daughters complains her sister has hit her. Lines such as that feel shocking, yet low key, which is often the tone of this show, although it’s also full of quips. A great supporting cast, too, including Jenny Slate (again) and the wonderful Paul Reiser. A second season is on the way, which is good news and surprising for a show that is so quietly confrontational. Maybe one day we’ll get some of these, are there any others we’re missing? |