There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.The second series finale provided a Read more ...

There have been some highly unlikely couplings in the long history of television comedy, but the one between Debbie from The Archers and Joey from Friends in the first series of Episodes ranked somewhere near the top of the list. If the viewers struggled to be convinced by that oddly implausible tryst, at least we weren’t alone. It turns out Tamsin Greig’s character Beverly Lincoln can’t quite believe it happened either.It is Bev’s bout of improbable (and – as it transpired – unjustified) revenge sex which is destined to hang like a smoggy sky over series two of Episodes, the Golden Globe- Read more ...

“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than once in the evening. For this exceptionally hilarious and perceptive play, which opened last night, not only tickles the insides of your arm, but also lights up the senses and then gives you a quick cuddle, too.Hilary is 50; she lives with her husband Mark and 15-year-old daughter Tilly. It’s a nice middle-class family. So when Tilly brings home Read more ...

Episodes may prove to be the zenith of television’s obsession with making television about making television. It was certainly a handy primer for anyone who fell asleep around 2000 (perhaps during My Hero; you are forgiven) and missed all the dominant strands of TV comedy emerging over the next decade. We hadn't simply been here before; Episodes was incubated in the post-ironic, multilayered comedic landscape in which we all now live. The success of the US version of The Office was referenced within the first five minutes. I’m surprised it took so long.Episodes seems to want to have it all: Read more ...

The accepted wisdom that Americans screw up every British comedy they buy the rights to is to be given a post-modern twist. Shooting was announced this week for a new sitcom called Episodes. It features a pair of British comedy writers – they also happen to be a married couple - whose idea for a new sitcom is purchased by a US broadcaster. The twist? That they must replace their lead actor, a distinguished RSC veteran played by Richard Griffiths, with the notably one-dimensional Matt LeBlanc.The joke underpinning the idea is that American money despises British talent. Perhaps it would have Read more ...

Tamsin Greig takes her mighty stage chops to a new level in The Little Dog Laughed, a minor Broadway comedy that gets a major star performance from Greig in her first West End role since God of Carnage. Tearing into a role that deservedly won its New York originator, Julie White, a 2007 Tony Award, Greig gives a cyclonic performance in a play that suffers palpable subsidence every time she leaves the stage. Beane's brittle if, at times, fairly banal satire isn't greatly enhanced by opening back-to-back with Six Degrees of Separation, an earlier, far more expansive American play that (for Read more ...