Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Badults, Episode 2, review
If you didn't know that the three-man sketch troupe Pappy's Fun Club had ended their long Fringe career in a riot of acclaim, you certainly wouldn't have guessed it from Badults.
Their new sitcom's premise is parcelled in the title: Matthew, Ben and Tom are late twenty-somethings still living together like students, and they are 'bad at being adults'. There's nothing all that original to the comic set-up - we first saw this sort of set up in The Young Ones.
And if the 'sit' is nothing to grab our attention, then neither, disappointingly, is the 'com'. But this latest BBC 3 commission should have had potential: Pappy's fanbase is only a little short of fanatical and their 2012 hit Pappy's Last Show Ever proved they could spin a narrative out of their sketches.
So why is their sitcom so much worse? The problem is mainly a failed transition. Pappy's frenetic capering carried their weaker jokes in live performance. Now, despite the undiscerning mirth of their studio audience, much less of the trio's energy reaches the viewer at home - which forces them to rely more heavily on their material.
Unfortunately, the material has also got worse. Pappy's were never afraid to elicit a groan before a laugh, but their weaker jokes are now inexcusably limp. The standard hovers around the Christmas cracker level. For instance, after a sleepless night trying to become successful entrepreneurs, the caffeine-wired Badults trotted out financial puns: "The FTSE 100 – here's a list of a hundred people I've played footsie with. And now, the 'Stock' Exchange: I've got beef, he's got chicken, you've got veg." And so on and so forth
Famously, sitcoms need time to settle down and this second episode of Badults was, thankfully, an improvement on the first. There was an amusing running joke about Coldplay, and entertaining things happened with stick insects. But this only highlighted a problem that wasn't going away: the cartoon-like characters.
The episode's plot revolved around the siblings Matthew (Matthew Crosby) and Rachel (Emer Kenny). But while she barely has a character (or comic timing), his, the nerdy organiser, is only two-dimensional. They barely feel real, so we can't bring ourselves to care whether she thinks he's a bad brother, or what happens when his elaborate ploys go wrong.
In their sketch comedy, Pappy's needed easily-grasped characters like this to construct a series of playlets. But Badults puts sketch-sized characters on the rack to fill up a whole sitcom. The result is something like torture.
Badults continues on BBC Three at 10pm next Tuesday
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2f5ae38d/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0Ctv0Eand0Eradio0Ereviews0C10A2111190CBadults0EEpisode0E20Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
