SMALL TOWN, BIG STORY (Sky Atlantic)
On paper, it looks great.
Take a star from 'Mad Men,' another from 'The Wire' and put them in an Irish sitcom created by a star of 'The IT Crowd'.
Add into the mix one of Britain's best screen actors and a squadron of Ireland's best supporting actors and you have a definite comedy hit, right?
Er, no because sometimes what looks good on paper can end up being disappointing onscreen if the gags are just not up to scratch.
That's certainly the case with Chris O'Dowd 'Small Town, Big Story,' with Christina Hendricks and Paddy Considine in the main roles and Clarke Peters in a minor one.
Set in a Co Fermanagh town that wins the battle to provide locations for a 'Game of Thrones' style drama about the Celts, it's handsomely shot by Jonas Mortensen and Ruairi O'Brien but unfortunately it's about as funny as a tax return.
Hendricks plays Wendy Patterson, a TV producer and former resident of Drumban on the northern side of the Irish border who brings the high profile US produced drama to her hometown.
However it soon becomes clear Wendy isn't there just to make the show.
She's there to settle scores and rattle a few skeletons.
Specifically she has come to force Considine's local GP and former boyfriend, Seamie Proctor to admit he and she were abducted by aliens in their teens.
A respected member of the community, Seamie has other issues to contend with - specifically the fact that his wheelchair confined wife, Eileen Walsh's Catherine is having a fling with a fellow school teacher, Peter McGann's Matt Magee.
With fellow townsfolk such as his son David Rawle's Sonny, daughter Leia Murphy's Joanne, Sam C Wilson's Big Jim, Evanne Kilgallon's Shelley McGoldrick, Patrick Martins' Jules O'Brien, David Wilmot's Kevin McCurdle and Andrew Bennett's Barry Battles preoccupied with the TV production, will Seamie buckle under the pressure exerted by Wendy and risk all credibility by admitting what happened in the past?
And what are we to make of Chris O'Dowd's shifty writer behind the TV show?
Having previously created a wonderful sitcom for Sky in the shape of 'Moone Boy,' it's hard to understand why O'Dowd fails to land most of his comic punches with 'Small Town, Big Story'.
Perhaps he's not as comfortable trying to sustain comedy over the course of hour long episodes as opposed to a half an hour format that 'Moone Boy' mined so effectively.
Maybe he's uncomfortable with the Northern Ireland vernacular of this show as opposed to his hometown of Boyle in Co Roscommon.
However there's also something rather dispiriting about seeing a really good actor like Paddy Considine being derailed by a dodgy Northern Ireland accent and a seasoned sitcom performer like O'Dowd just overacting.
Hendricks emerges the strongest of the leads bringing plenty of spite to her role, while Peters doesn't so much phone in his performance as Skype in a flatly written role.
Fleeting guest appearances by Susan Lynch as an English actress cast in the Celts drama, Deirdre O'Kane as a casting director and Maeve Higgins as a health service inspector are rare bright spots, as is Ruth McCabe's turn as Barry Battles' formidable mum.
However other guest appearances by Ian McElhinney as Wendy's Bible thumping dad, Fionnula Flanagan as her mother, Simon Delaney as a taxi driver, David O'Doherty as a school principal, Paul Tylak as a banker, Hugh O'Connor as a VFX artist, Amy Huberman as Showbiz Shirley and a grunting James Michie as a local who may know more about aliens than he is letting on simply underwhelm.
'Small Town, Big Story' may look good but its hour long scripts feel really flabby and laboured.
It's as if the humour has been sucked out of O'Dowd by aliens, funny enough.
('Small Town, Big Story' was broadcast on Sky Atlantic from February 27-April 3, 2025 with all episodes made available on SkyMax and NowTV on February 27, 2025)
FUNBOYS (BBC3)
If you thought O'Dowd's comedy is disappointing, then steel yourself for 2025's most sharply divisive comedy - Ryan Dylan and Rian Lennon's new BBC3 sitcom 'Funboys'.
Fans of the show, including several English newspaper critics, think it's a brilliant fusion of 'This Country,' 'The In Betweeners' and 'Father Ted' with rural Northern Irish accents.
If you're not a fan of the four episode show, though, you'll find it a toe curling experience - clunky in its execution, gauchely written and embarrassingly acted.
I'm in the latter camp - finding it depressingly laugh free despite the presence of Jamie Demetriou as a guest in one episode.
The story of three lads, Dylan's Callum, Lennon's Jordan and Lee R James' Lorcan passing the time in the fictional Co Antrim backwater of Ballymacnoose, it has the weirdest credits sequence of any sitcom in years which looks like it may have been ripped straight from a 1980s daytime soap opera.
Over its four episode run Lennon, who directs it, desperately goes for cheap gags at the expense of Ele McKenzie's sexually promiscuous English blow-in Gemma Wilton and its three culchie protagonists.
Episodes see Jordan having a mental breakdown over Callum dating Gemma, Callum discovering his inner bastard while staying at Lorcan's house, Lorcan and the lads mythologising a special pig, Jordan losing it over Callum developing a special relationship with his gay daddies and a party that Gemma and Lorcan throws that goes really awry.
There's an awful lot of really poor taste masturbation gags including one in the opening episode involving a pedal operated swan boat and a gross and frankly pretty disturbing scene in the final installment involving Jamie Demetriou.
Jokes at the expense of Jordan's suicidal tendencies feel in very poor taste and just aren't funny.
And while it shares the same producer as 'This Country,' 'Funboys' lacks the genuine rapport that that show had for its characters and its shrewd comic observations about rural life.
The affection that 'This Country' had for Kerry, Kurtan and the Vicar enabled the Somerset sitcom to bear its teeth from time to time and occasionally deliver mischievous, acerbic wit.
By way of contrast, 'Funboys' is more preoccupied with knob gags and desperately trying to occasionally convince its audience it is a work of surreal Northern Irish genius.
It ain't.
'Funboys' made me feel a bit more warm about 'Small Town, Big Story'.
Hell, it almost made me appreciate BBC Northern Ireland's dreadful long running sitcom 'Give My Head Peace'.
Oh, the horror, the horror.
('Funboys' was made available on the BBC IPlayer on February 10, 2025 and broadcast on BBC3 from February 13 2025 and BBC1 from February 28 2025)
Comments
Post a Comment