It’s complete madness that Review gets three episodes to wrap itself up. But, best to go out on a high, I suppose. I managed to keep the episode count from Alasdair, so the end did throw him, a very enjoyable experience. I vaguely remembered the penultimate task, but really thought it ended there. The fact that it didn’t is a testament to the dedication of this show to kick Forrest when he’s down. No let up, no mercy. Brutal.
Oh the pressures of finishing uni/your four-season sitcom/dramedy. The finish line looms and you’ve got to stick the landing. Fresh Meat just about does that, even if a lot of the characters - Oregon in particular - are completely unrecognisable from the beginning of the show, and not in a particularly compelling or natural way. The last episode is quite sweet, and I’ll absolutely buy Howard moving to Harpenden.
Sam is a fascinating character, who then and now I find very hard to read. She strings JP along, she breaks Howard’s heart, she gets between Kingsley and Josie. It’s very ambiguous as to whether this is her being a terrible person and doing it deliberately, or whether this is projected onto her by the others, and actually she is just going about the world living her life. It’s hard, I think, to not feel like every now and then there’s a glint in her eye that sugegsts the former.Hmm.
Sabine is a fun introduction to the cast this season, stealing careers fair pens is a time honoured tradition, and it’s still better at individual moments than trying to do story arcs.
Unsurprisingly a product of its time, but then I suppose so was I - Fresh Meat pretty much perfectly correlated with my time at uni, the final season coming out in my final year. It’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t date it - Russell Brand sleeps with girls, and one character tells the other not to use the r word - admittedly they use it in telling them not to, but still! The tuition fees demo/march episode is cut together in a very fun way, that rang a bell. Horrifically true to life in an archetypal kind of way.
A slightly disappointing follow-up to Schitts Creek from Dan Levy, although I don’t think it’s massively fair to compare them as apples and oranges. Big Mistakes is really not trying to be that. I just don’t know if it knows what it is trying to be. The balance between drama and comedy feels off somehow, and I’m never fully engaged in the plot or the characters. It feels open ended enough that another season is sure to come, and I’ll happily check in on it again to see where it goes. Maybe just an expectations management job.
Six seasons and a movie indeed. Paget Brewster and Keith David do an excellent job as a final addition to the cast, never aping those who came before them. A broadly satisfying conclusion to a show that maybe was better left in the amber of my memories. I think an amount of slingshotting will occur, though, if I watch it again in a few years time. The sheen just needed bursting a bit to get to a point where I can take it on its own terms.
The prodigal son returns. It’s still one of the wildest behind the scenes about turns I’ve seen on major television. Thrilled to have Brie Larson return and used properly for a few episodes, and this handles a somewhat more grounded version of the show in a way that, with time, I’ve come to appreciate more than the oft-cited “hey day”.
Hello gas leak year. Yeah, it is a drop off, isn’t it. I think the most telling thing is the difference in how Abed is written. I’d be hard pressed to fully commit to the theory of Abed as Dan Harmon’s author avatar, but it’s clear that Harmon knew what he was doing on an innate level with how that character is written, and this season fully misses the mark there. He becomes sharpened, crueller, lacking in the heart that was actually there.
This is where we really start moving into way too many concept episodes, especially ones that are basically just documentaries. It makes you long for just a normal episode of a sitcom. I still, though, got a little shiver at the end of the final episode. 18 year old Sam absolutely ate this up, and I don’t blame him for that. If anything, I wish I could access that bit of myself again, because - whisper it - some of this does grate now, especially the Chang story line. Still, John Goodman is a treat and Remedial Chaos Theory is a lot of fun.
Back subjecting Alasdair to Review, which is always fun to watch. Season 2 really doubles down on the long-term narrative of what effect this has on Forrest’s life, which I really enjoy in combination with an escalation of the individual tasks, which get us to RPGs and murder, before throwing itself completely into the mythology of the show itself. Is Grant evil? James Urbaniak plays him with such moral ambiguity, I love it.
I remembered this season as being the platonic ideal of Community, the shift into high concept before it slightly started biting off more than it could chew in the next season and then the rollercoaster of the second half of the show’s run. I’m less enamoured with it than I was at the time. Some episodes still hit very well, but others have lost their lustre over time. A bit too pleased with itself in the final paintball episodes. Hrmm.
I’ve been wanting to do a Community rewatch for ages, and eventually it just kinda happened. It’s weird. It’s so 2009. Painfully so at times. It exists in a world where everything is fine, we’re all very progressive, Obama’s just been elected, so the floodgates have opened for the kind of ironic racism/sexism/homophobia jokes that defined a brief window of a generation. It’s a very specific 2009-era of what feminism means to characters like Britta. The gay jokes are wildly abundant, more than anything else. They don’t… they don’t make me uncomfortable, or wanting to cancel the show, etc. It’s just weird. It broadly holds up to my recollection of this season being the dare I say grounded college sitcom it later grew out of. I’m still fond of it, but even from this season, I think my implicit ranking of it has shifted compared to the other sitcoms of that time. We’ll see.
This year, we’ve made a conscious effort to stay up for the Oscars, in a planned way (unlike last year’s getting to Sunday afternoon and going “…I mean shall we?”). It’s always good craic. We have plenty of snacks and cocktails to see us through the proceedings. The show feels both tighter than normal but still somehow drags on for hours. Conan is nailing the hosting continually, and I hope he’s back next year. The choice to only do two songs is baffling and disappointing, but, it has to be said, is very funny happening the year Dianne Warren gets nominated for a song about herself in a documentary about her. Incredible scenes.
Still watching
Still watching
Still watching
Still watching
Long a fan of Conan, and I remember watching at least some of those early Conan Without Borders episodes, and Conan Must Go has been on my list since pretty much that insane Hot Ones episode. O’Brien is a generous presence, happy for others to get the laughs at his expense, but clearly also genuinely curious about the world around him and knows the comedy value in jumping headfirst into situations. The Larry David impersonator blind date is an absolute highlight, as is the tango to Kiss Of Fire. Good company.
Still watching
At this point, I don’t know what else you can expect. They are definitely getting thicker, though. Like, seriously. Normally there’s at least three or four vaguely qualified people just to make sure that it’s not a complete no-hoper show for the finale, but outside of Karishma, I don’t know who even had a hope of being invested in here. The 20th anniversary “celebrations” were hilariously underwhelming (and I love Big Zuu!) and I think it’s very funny that the celebrations have just silently disappeared. Ah well. It’s solid background.
Despite having incredibly fond memories of Love Soup from nigh on 20 years ago (which held up on rewatch last year) and Jonathan Creek, I had never got round to arguably David Renwick’s most popular show. Prompted by a forum discussion on the best plotting in comedy, in which the two most common responses were OFITG and Cabin Pressure, it felt time to get on with it. Forewarned that it hits its stride in series 2, I still really enjoyed the early iteration of it. It beds in very quickly, each episode jams a lot in (to great effect, not a criticism) but isn’t quite doing the Seinfeld dovetailing yet. I look forward to seeing how this develops.
This oddly passed me by at the time, but with the second series beginning and it being back in the semi-public consciousness, it was time to dig in and oh what a thrill to have done so. It’s so confident in its own particular voice, Lucia Keskin’s specific silly sense of humour, completely deadpan but full of half-baked vignettes. I can understand how this might not be for everyone, but what a treat for those on her wavelength.
An odd little one, this. It’s perfectly fine, some decent enough jokes, the plot moves along nicely. But that’s… it? It feels like a waste of Mark Heap and Dawn French to make something so grounded. It’s missing a spark to properly ignite it into something good. It sometimes feels like Simon Mayhew-Archer - who does, to his credit, an awful lot to raise awareness around Parkinsons - set out to make a comedy that included a good representation of Parkinsons, and then once that was achieved (which it was, Heap’s character gets a lot of good moments around that), didn’t really push much beyond that. A shame for the loss of potential, but maybe a second series could double down.
After a really solid year of Taskmaster with series 19 and 20, maybe the best back to back pair for some time, it’s a disappointing New Year’s Treat to start off 2026. The contestants themselves are fine, but everything else around it is the worst parts of Taskmaster dialled up to 11, with Alex Horne at his most weird/fetish/fan-service-y.
We all know what to expect at this point. It retains its charms - a delight to see John Kearns added to the roster, and of course it’s always a pleaasure getting more Bob Mortimer.
Oh it’s still one of the best things on television, isn’t it? I mean my god. The tension in that last episode! The “secret traitor” conceit didn’t quite pan out as well as one might have hoped, but still threw something into the mix, at least, rather than stasis. It’s fascinating to see multiple traitors win for the first time, which hopefully demonstrates to future contestants that they don’t have to betray fellow traitors to win, but it’s still a possibility. Should lead to some interesting gameplay, especially as we’re now happily in a feedback loop of players understanding what is and isn’t possible in the game, pushing the envelope (Matt making a pitch to get recruited!) which then becomes accepted lore. God bless Stephen for getting through all that.