The coronavirus pandemic has pushed people across the globe to remain in quarantine and halted every scheduled concert tour and festival. Canceled tours have put a strain on musicians who have recently released new music, but the quarantine has given many an opportunity to devote time to work on new material. Charli XCX is using the time to create an entire, collaborative album from scratch. Fellow-UK pop star Dua Lipa is following suit. Though the singer just released her sophomore LP, Lipa says she is could soon start plotting her next era.
Lipa released the album Future Nostalgia last month. The singer had planned an extensive tour to promote the record as well as several summer festival appearances. But since the quarantine has put her summer tour plans on hold, the singer is itching to get back into the studio. In a recent interview with Will Manning on the UK radio show Official Big Top 40 Sunday, Lipa said she expects to begin working on her Future Nostalgia follow-up “sooner rather than later.”
Lipa told Manning that although her next album isn’t yet in the planning stages, she hopes to get back into the studio soon. “Obviously, I was meant to go on tour in April, which got postponed,” Lipa said in the interview. “So, I probably will start thinking about my new album sooner rather than later. Just because I’ll probably have a bit of time to maybe go to the studio at some point and, kind of, get back in. But, we’ll see.”
The singer also outlined her recent album’s goal: “At the end of the day, I do just want to make my fans proud. I want to make sure I give you good and fun music and something that really represents who I am.”
Adding to the list of celebrities who have held livestream events during the quarantine, Diddy hosted an Instagram live dance-a-thon fundraiser Sunday with an array of celebrities. Joining him in his event to benefit healthcare workers were Lizzo, J. Lo, Cardi B, Future, Drake, and many others. The event garnered tens of thousands of viewers and was successful in raising money. Moreover, fans were able to get an inside scoop about Drake’s upcoming music. During his live session with Diddy, Drake revealed his album is well underway.
Taking a break from dancing, Drake sat down with Diddy to talk about music. The rapper said he has been working on a new project “for a while now.” Drake also referred to the time he’s had during quarantine as a “silver lining” because he has been able to devote all of his attention to writing music:
“I’m working on the album, I’ve been working on it for a while now. Another silver lining is, when God does get you to sit down. I remember the last time I had to sit down was when I tore my ACL. And I made a great album out of that. Obviously, God has us all inside the house right now sitting down, so the amount of focus I’m able to put into this album is probably way different than it would’ve been if I had to go through the residency in Vegas and be able to go meet up with Justin in Miami or whatever. Saying that, this is the most excited I’ve been about an album in a long time. A lot of little stuff has been trickling out, but all the stuff on the album is fresh, is brand new, and I’m excited. This is probably the most music I’ve been sitting on. I’m hyped.”
Drake said “all fresh” music is coming and that this is the most excited he’s ever been for an album on Diddy’s IG live. pic.twitter.com/6dRU0A7Svp
— James Fauntleroy Stan Account (@yoyotrav) April 13, 2020
Elsewhere in the livestream, Diddy added Drake to his list of top five favorite rappers. “It’s clear, the work you put in, you’re in my official top five. For real,” Diddy said.
No one knows for sure when we can go back to theaters (fall, hopefully), but Warner Bros. is sticking with Dune‘s planned December 18 release date. The lack of a nudging-back looks like a shining beacon of light in the darkness right now, yes? That’s one reason why it’s worth beholding the sight of Timothée Chalamet in this first look at Denis Villeneuve’s epic reboot. The Call Me by Your Name actor portrays protagonist Paul Atreides. Courtesy of Vanity Fair, we can drink a taste in right now, though one must click through for the full effect.
It’s not much, I know. Lots of mystery abounds about how Villeneuve plans to tackle Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi/fantasy epic novel. Obviously, this will be an epic treatment, but the Blade Runner 2049 director will attempt to succeed where other directors have most decidedly not prevailed over the source material. David Lynch famously had his name removed as director of the 1984 version, which sputtered into cinemas after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970s take failed to materialize.
The above image shows no sandworm-y or spice-mining business going on, but rather, we see Paul on a beach and preparing to depart with Atreides leadership on a transport ship. Chalamet revealed to Vanity Fair that he wished to play Paul because “in a story of such detail and scale and world-building, the protagonist is on an anti-hero’s-journey of sorts.” He’s also aiming to be a young general down the line, but fate will intervene.
Dune will also star Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård, and more. Again, the movie’s due to hit theaters on December 19. Fingers crossed!
There’s the “Ni!”-spouting nerds on the “Homer Goes to College” episode of The Simpsons. There’s years of Mystery Science Theater 3000 using Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a go-to reference. There’s the guy in Paranormal Activity obliviously asking the murderous ghost, “What is your quest? What is your favorite color?” The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch pops up in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Martin Scorsese made a film of Joe Connelly’s novel Bringing Out the Dead as a nod to the line “Bring out your dead!” The words “just a flesh wound” are winkingly used in National Lampoon’s European Vacation (by Eric Idle), Fierce Creatures (by John Cleese), Gremlins 2, Dogma, Sin City, Rush Hour 3, Taken, Elysium, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, Logan, even Michael Bay’s manly 13 Hours. And then there’s Spamalot.
For the last 45 years, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has never not been a part of pop culture. Its abundant quotables routinely pop up in other media and out of the mouths of teenagers, their minds poisoned by endless rewatches. But the movie’s enduring appeal has always been about more than fans quoting jokes about shrubberies and killer bunnies. Somehow a low-budget British comedy funded by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Genesis — a nerd object that’s less a parody of the Arthurian legend than a string of absurdist sketches, non-sequiturs, and assorted silliness — has proven a game-changer and an influencer, in ways major and minor.
The ones most changed by Holy Grail was, of course, the Monty Python group: Cleese, Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam. When their second film hit theaters in April of 1975, they were about to go next level, but also close to losing a limb, Black Knight-style. Cleese was half-out of the group, ditching the fourth series of Flying Circus to shoot his solo show, Fawlty Towers. On the other hand, Flying Circus had just finally hit American airwaves, five years after it began on the BBC. Combine that with the group’s first movie, And Now For Something Completely Different — a primer for newbies, in which they re-filmed the best sketches from the first two series, and which had tanked in America in 1972 but done well when reissued in 1974 — and suddenly Python were cult comedy royalty, leaders of a new, dweebier British Invasion. When Holy Grail arrived, it was perfect timing.
What Python had created, though, would do more than cement their status, or make them lots of money, or even pave the way for future Python movies. It also helped take British comedy worldwide. There was, of course, plenty of British comedy on American airwaves and in theaters before Flying Circus and Holy Grail, but they tended to attract small audiences. Most Americans didn’t watch Steptoe and Son or Till Death Us Do Part, but everyone tuned into their American remakes, Sanford and Son and All in the Family. That remains largely true today; how many American fans of the American version of The Office religiously rewatch, or have even seen, the English original? But Python’s success, made bigger by Holy Grail, created a larger, more concentrated cult around British comedy in America and elsewhere. It’s why you have large swaths of stateside fans who can quote chapter and verse of The Young Ones, Blackadder, Spaced, The IT Crowd, Peep Show, various Alan Partridge programs, and so on.
Python wasn’t the first sketch comedy troupe to make a movie. Even though there were only two of them, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had made Bedazzled in 1967, which had a proper story but which also allowed them to appear in various guises. But after Holy Grail, the flood gates opened. It’s the movie that every sketch comedy troupe aspires to make, from Cheech and Chong to Kids in the Hall, from Broken Lizard to SNL. Wet Hot American Summer, Mo’ Money, and Run Ronnie Run owe it their lives as well. Even movies that are simply sketches, with no story, like TheKentucky Fried Movie, only exist because Python made it safe for sketch comedy troupes to invade the big screen, and you might as well throw the Muppets in there, too.
But Holy Grail’s influence can be felt in specific ways as well. The budget was so tiny that there was no money for flashy opening credits. That wound up being a blessing: Only being able to afford white titles over a black screen, they devised something simple and brilliant, having a basic introductory sequence slowly undone by jokes Swedish tourism, numerous sacked credit-makers, and llamas. It wasn’t the first film with funny, meta opening credits (the 1969 short Bambi Meets Godzilla is another excellent example), but it was the one that stepped up the game. Deadpool’s own self-referential opening would be nowhere without it.
The reason Python didn’t have money left for opening credits should be obvious: They spent it all on period costumes and props and on-location shoots. Despite being a comedy where characters pretend to ride horses while clapping coconuts together, Holy Grail remains one of the more accurate films about medieval times, filled with dirt and grime and chasmic class disparity. Chapman’s King Arthur is quickly befuddled when speaking with Palin’s politically progressive peasant, and Idle’s lowly dead collector knows Arthur is royalty because “he hasn’t got s*it all over him.”
There were plenty of comedies set in historical times before Holy Grail, but the ones that followed — Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Your Highness, even Shrek — aren’t trying to imitate them. They’re trying to imitate Monty Python and the Holy Grail. At the same time, Holy Grail ruined most straight-faced historical movies. You can’t watch Excalibur, John Boorman’s hard-R King Arthur movie from six years later, without thinking of Holy Grail, just as it’s hard to watch any Biblical movie without thinking of Life of Brian.
There’s another thing in Holy Grail that’s also lifelike: It’s awfully bloody and violent. A historian gets his throat slashed by a knight on horseback, in graphic close-up. Cleese’s Black Knight shoves a sword through another knight’s helmet, then loses all four limbs. Sir Lancelot (Cleese again) goes on a massacre. So does the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, whose first victim loses his head. And it’s still rated PG! (The Black Knight scene, with its crimson geysers spurting from clunky armor, looks so much like Robert Bresson’s arty Lancelot du Lac, released one year prior, that that movie is ruined as well.) It’s not hard to imagine Grail being a watershed movie for those into gory horror-comedies — people like Sam Raimi, the late Stuart Gordon, Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright, who must have thought this PG-rated comedy was onto something.
One of Grail’s boldest gambits is saved for last: Arthur and Jones’ Bedivere are suddenly arrested by cops (for a crime they didn’t even commit!) and the movie just stops. It’s the one part of the film that’s proven eternally divisive. Even some of its most ardent fans despise how it ends, while moviegoers at the time, suddenly confronted with two minutes of whimsical organ music over black, with no end credits, weren’t sure when to leave the theater. It plays like Python’s twist on the downer endings that were all the rage in gritty ’70s New Hollywood: abrupt, sometimes ambiguous conclusions, as in Easy Rider, The French Connection, and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that often left you hanging. (A more lighthearted variation on this can be seen in the original The Italian Job from 1969, which ends with a literal cliff-hanger.)
But the Holy Grail ending is different. It’s more aggressive, belligerent, almost like an eff-you to anyone who expected resolution or at least a punchline. Instead, the punchline is on them. Python had done sudden non-endings on Flying Circus; one episode ends with the characters, flustered by how silly things have gotten, agreeing to end the sketch, then walking off, prompting the end credits. But that’s a three-minute sketch. This is a feature film, some 90 minutes long.
There’s a gleeful malevolence to the Grail ending, and you can picture all six Python members snickering as viewers scratch their heads or huff and puff. Likewise you can imagine other combative filmmakers thinking of Python when they devised their own, sometimes aggravating sudden endings. Think of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood,Blair Witch Project, and Meek’s Cutoff, and perhaps the most maddening of them all, John Sayles’ Limbo, which never reveals if its protagonists were rescued or murdered. Was David Chase thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail when he devised the ending of The Sopranos? Possibly! Chase had many reasons for leaving Tony Soprano’s fate up in the air, but one of them is that he probably knew, as Python did, that it’s pretty funny if you cruelly deny your audience satisfaction by simply stopping.
Cruise ships, particularly mega-cruises, have always been polarizing. The people who like them love them; the people who don’t like them despise them — there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the flaws with cruise ships have been supremely evident. You know, like the fact that they’re contained biospheres, prone to viral outbreaks; their outsized impact on both the ports they visit and the environment at large; and the ways their parent companies operate as quasi-American businesses, while actually registered in tax havens with low minimum wages.
Last week, it came to light that the Greg Mortimer, an Australian ship headed to Antarctica, was gradually being evacuated after it was reported that 60% of the passengers and crew had contracted coronavirus. It had been quarantined off the coast of Uraguay since the beginning of the month. It was, of course, only the most recent of multiple cruise ship outbreaks during this era. Meanwhile, as the details of the $2T stimulus bill have come to light, it’s grown clear that cruise lines were left out of the package.
Then there’s the current public sentiment, which is… not favorable. John DiScala, widely known in the travel community as Johnny Jet, got cruisers up in arms last week after saying that he wouldn’t go on a cruise for at least a year after the quarantine lifts. Fellow travel writer Tamara Hinson wrote a piece about it for the Telegraph, which leads off with, “Cruising has borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic in multiple ways.” A bold lede and demonstrably untrue. The poor have borne the brunt of the pandemic (and all pandemics, historically speaking) and cruising has so many issues tangled up in matters of wealth disparity (from their tax evasion to their outsized effect on the developing nations they visit to their labor conditions and wages) that framing these multinational corporations as victims wasn’t likely to elicit much sympathy.
With its clay feet on full display and business shut down besides a few “ghost ships,” perhaps the question for the cruise industry isn’t when they start operating but how? What have they learned from the shutdown and how will consumers demand better of them moving forward?
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“I don’t know that there’s going to be an appetite for packed cruises anymore,” says DiScala, when asked about how the industry might change post-coronavirus. “They’re going to have to stagger going to port, they’re not going to be able to have unmanned buffets, people will probably need to wear masks when they’re sharing spaces. But the biggest thing is that I think the passenger load of ships will dramatically change.”
A shift to more transparency in how these businesses are run would mark an even bigger change. When Friends of the Earth released their 2019 Cruise Ship Report Card, it saw 15/16 major cruise lines getting an F for transparency. Carnival Cruise Lines and Princess Cruises, a Carnival subsidiary, have incurred repeated fines in the past three years for illegal, intentional dumping of waste. Meanwhile, the practice of cruise companies basing themselves in tax havens in order to pay minimal taxes has clearly come back to bite them.
“I don’t know if those things will change,” DiScala said. “But I have been shocked at how many people have responded via my Facebook page; people who were big-time cruisers who have said they won’t get on a cruise again. Still… they have so many big ships in these fleets, I think even if we see ‘free trips’ — where they just want to get people on board to spend money at the casino or alcohol, which could happen — they’ll have a hard time getting people interested in the short term.”
Whether he’s right or not likely depends on how “short term” is defined. While 2020 is likely a wash, 2021 cruise bookings are actually strong. If you like cruises — and the industry has a famously loyal base — it’s tough to deny the allure of cheap cruises with their endless buffets as a vacation option in the aftermath of a recession? One thing that the “vote with your dollars” conversation never seems ready to face is that, on the individual level, it’s easy to make ethical compromises in favor of sheer affordability or perceived value. And while the deluge of cruise passengers hitting developing nations for a few hours at a time to wander around their ports buying trinkets and tee-shirts isn’t as transformative for those communities as it ought to be (cruises are notorious for trying to keep all consumer spending on their ships), economically stressed destinations are going to be happy for that foot traffic.
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Of all the sectors that will be trying to scrape their way back to business as usual, cruising has a solid shot. Thanks to their light tax burdens, cruise lines seem to have built a better firewall for themselves than airlines. Carnival reported to investors that it could pay its debts for up to a year without any revenue. And while company stocks are down drastically, they saw an uptick after a massive influx of Saudi Arabian cash. The play for the cruise lines seems to be the same one they use when unable to make port during a storm: Ride it out and proceed as usual when the weather clears.
Meaning that if there was to be a major change in cruising, it’s probably not coming from the cruise lines themselves. At least not voluntarily. It would have to be led by a longterm shift in how the consumer operates — their desires and what they’ll pay for in the months and years after the pandemic. DiScala believes that first and foremost, travelers will want smaller, more manageable trips.
“I think river cruises in Europe will do well out of all this,” DiScala says. “The problem is that I don’t know how much bigger that particular market can get, until they find new rivers and destinations. But as someone who likes cruising, I would definitely go on a river cruise before I’d go on an ocean cruise.”
With the quarantine continuing on, predicting consumer behavior in the new world is impossible. Maybe things will go back to “normal” as the cruise lines desperately hope. Maybe DiScala’s predictions — from manned buffets to smaller carrying capacities on ships to more bespoke cruise routes — will come to pass. Or maybe people will really interrogate this manner of mass travel altogether. Maybe cruising, like the airline industry, will finally be challenged by its passionate consumer-base and its haters alike to answer for its larger failings. Maybe we’ll collectively decide that returning to the way things were just isn’t good enough.
BBC America’s ‘Killing Eve’ first framed itself as procedural: a show about assassins and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service that attempts to take them down. More than that, though, the show tangoed through an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between Jodie Comer’s assassin and Sandra Oh’s MI6 agent. This season, that game evolves for the better, and our weekly coverage will keep an eye on how this show’s transforming, and it’s only growing bolder with the passage of time.
Killing Eve‘s third-season premiere episode, “Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey,” barges out of the gate, as expected, with a great deal of focus on its central pairing. As I wrote in my review, there will be a heavy skewing over the next several episodes towards this being The Villanelle Show, so get ready for that. (Eve is definitely still present, but the show spends a ton of time on Villanelle’s development.) We’ll talk about Villanelle in a minute, but first, the show catches up with Eve feeling understandably traumatized after what went down in Rome. Much of her airtime gets devoted to an unexpected (and downright traumatic) sendoff for a very beloved character, Sean Delaney’s Kenny. So obviously, we need to talk about Kenny. We also need to talk about the terrible joke that comes to mind here, which is that Killing Eve‘s evoking a repetitious line from early South Park seasons.
God, not Kenny. It’s just brutal, man, especially after Carolyn lectured him about how “life is just a series of trade-offs.” I feel so terribly about this development that I need to devote the entirety of this recap’s (reasonable) GIF bandwidth to some lovely moments that Eve shared with Kenny before he left the building. These were wonderfully wacky moments (the show’s penchant for morbid humor is still strong) with a drunken Eve giggling over sending him a toilet-paper text — hey, we all cope with trauma in different ways — and Kenny tracking her phone and scaring the bejesus out of her before they bonded while sh*t talking MI6. How great was Sandra Oh as Drunk Eve? Spectacular.
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What are we to make of new head writer Suzanne Heathcote’s decision to kill off a fan-favorite character in this premiere? It’s a brash move and a pivotal one. Kenny was apparently digging into the Twelve in his new capacity as an investigative journalist, and the Twelve meant to send a message. Further, it feels like a sacrificial move by the show after Eve survived being shot by Villanelle in Rome. Like, someone who meant a lot to fans needed to die, which sets the tone for the unexpected this season (anything can truly happen, and the show will spare no one). Also, we can wonder if Kenny’s death might propel Eve back into intelligence-agent action when Carolyn clearly wants her back at MI6. That could go either way, really.
Meanwhile, Eve’s very clearly wanting to literally hide in a kitchen to continue healing. Yes, she eventually grows frustrated with the way that her fellow kitchen employees talk about relationships that only remind her of Villanelle. She’s also very clearly able to see her own “stupid”-ness while lecturing a guy about not being able to read the signs of his own non-relationship. It sucks to see yourself reflected in a mirror like that, but maybe that’s Eve working some stuff out, kinda like self-therapy through projection. Tearing apart bloody meat also probably feels a little therapeutic, as insane as that would sound on many other shows.
Now onto Villanelle’s antics this episode, which begin with her wedding (!) to a wealthy Spanish woman. Since this is Killing Eve, the ceremony ends in a grand throwdown, and we meet Villanelle’s maker, Dasha (Dame Harriet Freaking Walter), who wants to lure her back into the Twelve. Every wedding should end like this, right?
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Through these interactions with Dasha, we get some delicious, heaping scoops of Villanelle’s amplified personality that a lot of people were probably missing. She’s one of my favorite sociopaths, after all, and she hates being called Oksana, so she’s Villanelle forever. She and Dasha are so good at mocking each other, and Villanelle’s ego performs some lovely maneuvers in this episode. There’s some really enjoyable back-and-forth where Dasha insists that her “work remains totally untouchable,” and that assassins study her kills. Villanelle’s not having any of that talk, but she ends up using Dasha’s signature while executing a hit in a shop that sells paprika.
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It’s left open to interpretation whether Villanelle intentionally copied Dasha’s move from the 1970s scene, but yeah, it sure seems like that’s the case? She walks away from this kill while deeming herself “untouchable” and wearing a cocky grin, and she had to have known that word of the paprika move would get back to Dasha. Whether or not she meant for this powder-method to mock or pay tribute to Dasha, well, that seems a little bit ambiguous. Who knows? Eve wants something from Dasha, and Dasha wants something from Eve, so nothing might be said of this imitation ever again.
A few loose ends here from some of the Killing Eve men:
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– Konstantin’s on the scene again, thank goodness. He’s being relatable with family issues (finally) and unrelatable while juggling three warring cell phones. It’s good to see the guy, even with that foreboding time-to-go-fishing note. Yeah, I hate it when I see that scrawled on a take-out menu, but he seems down for what was (and is) to come.
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– Niko, god. He’s Number Two on the “characters I feel most sorry for this episode” list. The man is nursing some heavy PTSD over there, and rightfully so after what happened to Gemma in that storage unit. He’s also correct in that he deserves more than Eve can offer him, and what a mess. Niko deserves some freedom and relief from the madness, but after what we saw happen to Kenny, I’m not sure that anyone will see happiness this season. Well, Villanelle’s determined to make her own happiness, but we’ll see how that works out as her story continues to unfold. It’s damn good to have Killing Eve back.
BBC America’s ‘Killing Eve’ airs on Sundays at 9:00 PM EST with simulcasting on AMC.
As the coronavirus continues to spread and more Americans become infected, many have shared their experiences with the virus. Pink recently detailed her symptoms after revealing she tested positive and discussed how the virus affected her three-year-old son. Now, Westside Gunn has confirmed he was also infected. But rather than give fans an up-to-date report, the rapper chose to keep his diagnosis under wraps until he recovered.
The rapper shared the news on social media. Gunn said he was ill for weeks and had gone to the hospital without being able to see his children. Gunn then attributed his recovery to his fans and the excitement surrounding his upcoming release:
“I have a confession to Make I’m a Corona Survivor I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me I had to thug it out for weeks I didn’t get to see my kids I went to the hospital feeling like I was breathing my last breath the fans and the love I was getting kept me strong I knew I had to drop this Pray for Paris bc GOD have bigger plans for me I went on Tidal live and Fat Joe live but soon as I was done I was right back on the breathing machine today is the first time besides the hospital that I’m about to go outside in a month thx to the ppl who did know and held me down now I’m about to go harder than I ever have that shit tore me up inside I literally thought I was dead designing these clothes and @virgilabloh having my back and @djpremier sending me a beat kept me motivated I’m back feeling myself don’t it look like I’m from Paris.”
Ahead of his coronavirus update, Westside Gunn discussed his upcoming record Pray For Paris on Tidal’s Instagram Live session. In the interview with Elliott Wilson, Gunn discussed his rumored collaboration with Kanye, saying it was put on hold due to the pandemic: “Ever since that day, we talk every other day. Just keeping in touch with each other… I might have an idea and send it to him.”
Impossible to replicate, even more difficult to get right, it’s best left to our cousins across the pond. Lucky for us, streaming has bridge that gap, introducing comedy fans from all over the world to what real sarcasm looks like. Mundane workplace comedies, bleak coming-of-age tales, a bunch of Simon Pegg and Ricky Gervais — this list has it all.
Here are the best British imports streaming right now.
What can we say about this genre-defining workplace comedy that hasn’t been said before? Ricky Gervais’ mockumentary has influenced some of the greatest works on television and despite its many predecessors, it remains the best example of what a good, mundane comedy series can do. Gervais as clueless boss David Brent, whose desperate attempts at connecting with his underlings are a painful exercise in futility. Martin Freeman is also a stand-out, playing a role that John Krasinski inhabited in the American remake, but it’s the British sarcasm that really elevates this series and makes it worthy of a watch.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who also created the show) stars as “a young woman attempting to navigate modern life in London.” That description hardly does the series justice. It’s a hysterical, dirty, sexually devious and surprisingly thoughtful meditation on grief and loneliness that goes by so quickly (there are only six half-hour episodes in each season) that viewers will wish they savored it more before it ends. There’s a gut punch around every corner, but Fleabag always manages to lift itself out of its depths to make us laugh again. It’s truly one of the most distinctive, original comedies of the last several years, and if we’re lucky, Waller-Bridge will become one of the leading creative voices of her generation.
Peep Show, besides being laugh-out-loud funny, is the kind of innovative comedy the British are known for. Using to-camera pans and inner monologues narrating real-time events, the show quite literally lets the audience peep in on its character’s lives. And they’re as cringe-worthy as you’d expect. David Mitchell plays Mark, a socially awkward loan manager bunking with his flatmate Jez (Robert Webb), a juvenile slacker with musical pipe dreams. The two don’t have much going for them, but that’s kind of the point. We’re meant to laugh at their failures, their lackluster love lives, their failed book club meetings, and maybe, take comfort in being able to say, “Hey, at least we’re not these guys.”
We wouldn’t have British comedy gems like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead if it weren’t for this series that’s full of realistically bleak humor. It brought together the creative team of Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost, capturing a slice of Gen X life with characters working in dead-end jobs, stuck in stagnant relationships, and generally unfulfilled in life. Sound funny? It is.
There’s more to love about this British political satire than just Peter Capaldi’s epic meltdown which feels tailor-made for these quarantined times. The show – created by Veep genius Armando Iannucci – brings a lot of the same government-based humor as its American successor, but with a decidedly English spin. The series follows the daily happening of the fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, a kind of catch-all government branch with a bumbling minister (played by Chris Langham) that’s overseen by Capaldi’s strict, rule-following enforcer, Malcolm Tucker. If you liked Veep and Parks and Rec but thought, “Man, they need more British sarcasm in here,” this one’s for you.
Matt Berry is comedy’s original renaissance man, an embarrassingly talented actor who can pull off some truly bizarre characters. He’s currently playing a centuries-old vampire on FX’s mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows, but that doesn’t mean his past work on this sitcom should be overlooked. Here, he plays Steven Toast, a struggling, middle-aged actor whose fraught personal life is more dramatic than anything he’s in on stage. There’s enough Berry to go around people!
Following in the footsteps of Nick Kroll’s Big Mouth, this British teem comedy is committed to exploring all of the cringe-worthy, taboo topics associated with sex, just not in animated form. The series follows a mother-son duo navigating their way through those uncomfortable “talks.” Of course, the mother here happens to be a sex therapist named Dr. Jean Milburn (a terrific Gillian Anderson) and her son Otis (Asa Butterfield) is the kid enduring her overbearing tendencies at home while doling out sex advice of his own in an underground sex therapy ring amongst his friends. Sex is a comedy goldmine, and although the show loves to play up ’80s high-school tropes, there’s real nuance and thought that goes into how these teens are portrayed and their interactions with sex. Plus, Anderson’s comedic timing is spot-on.
Most of the best comedy series are able to extract ridiculously funny storylines from the most mundane premise. That’s probably why this show, from comedy great Graham Lineham, is such a cult favorite. The series champions the real heroes of office life, the I.T. department, with a tech trio played by Chris O’Dowd, Richard Ayoade, and Katherine Parkinson, constantly bickering with their incompetent bosses and each other. It’s a bit of mindless fun, but it’ll make you appreciate your own I.T. guy more from watching.
How do you follow up a show as successful and culturally significant as The Office? If you’re Ricky Gervais, you do it by sticking to what you know. Extras is another tale sort-of based on the comedian’s life. In it, he plays Andy Millman, a background actor hoping to break big despite his lack of talent. He’s got a clueless agent (played by the always reliable Stephen Merchant) that makes his quest for fame that much harder, but laughing at Millman’s journey to B-level sitcom star is made more fun thanks to some ingenious celebrity cameos from icons willing to poke fun at themselves.
David Tennant and Michael Sheen star in this hellishly fun adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s beloved work of fantasy. Tennant plays Crowley, a demon who’s spent the past 6,000 years living life as a kind of rockstar on Earth. Sheen plays his angelic counterpart, Aziraphale, a bumbling seraph who also calls Earth home and as a reluctant friendship with his immortal enemy. The two must band together to prevent the Anti-Christ – a kid in Oxford shire – from rising to power, destroying the world, and, most importantly, Crowley’s best of Queen mixtape.
Before Irish comedian, Dylan Moran worked with Simon Pegg on Shaun of the Dead he gave British audiences this little comedic gift, a multi-camera sitcom set in a disorganized London book shop. Moran plays the owner, Bernard Black, a crusty, middle-aged grouch who loves smoking, drinking, and reading almost as much as he hates people. He hires an earnest, happy-go-lucky fellow named Manny (Bill Bailey) to do his booking and most of the jokes come thanks to their adversarial relationship.
It’s positively blasphemous how underappreciated this comedy series about a group of rowdy Catholic school girls living in Northern Ireland during the 90s. The girls get into all kinds of trouble — stealing lipstick from dead nuns, pranking hot priests, and holding holy statues hostage — to the backdrop of the Northern Ireland conflict. It’s funny and heartfelt and manages to weave the terror and trauma of living in a war-zone with the normal angst and adventures of teenagedom.
There’s a reason why not many people have seen or even heard of this show, and it’s not just because of its original name. Lovesick isn’t groundbreaking as a dramedy, but it works because of its nonlinear storytelling and its realistic portrayal of that awkward grey area that can form between love and friendship. After Dylan learns that he has an STD, he’s forced to pass along the diagnosis to his past sexual relationships. Each episode is then a snippet of Dylan’s life along with those of his two best friends, Luke and Evie (played by Antonia Thomas, a recognizable face to Misfits fans). While chronicling Dylan’s sexual past, Lovesick really depicts the ever-changing feelings between Dylan and Evie. It’s a simple rom-com depicted in a refreshing way with an even blend of comedy, heart, and chlamydia.
The British sitcom is essentially You’re the Worst if the couple at the center of it were 10 years older. Like the FX series, it’s another anti-romcom romcom, although this one involves pregnancy, children, and culture clash (he’s an American wanker, she’s an acerbic, potty-mouthed Irish school teacher). However, the constant bickering and sexual disagreements between Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan) are what makes Catastrophe so exhilarating. A more apt name for the series would be Amazon’s other series, Transparent, because the relationship between Sharon and Rob — warts and all — is the most open and honest in television, and maybe the funniest. The only downside to Catastrophe is that its seasons are each only six half-hour episodes long, and nine hours is not enough time to spend with these characters.
There is a rough-around-the-edges quality that makes Misfits irresistible. A rotating team of adolescents gains supernatural powers while they’re fulfilling their criminal community service requirements, but the X-Men they are not. It’s not easy to categorize them as “the good guys” considering all of the people they accidentally kill, but they certainly mean well. Fans of Game of Thrones and Preacher will see some familiar faces, but the whole cast is aces. There are rumblings of an American remake, but hopefully, that will never come to fruition. There is something so decidedly British about Misfits, but not in the stuffy way that people assume. It’s gritty, it’s crass, and to water that down for stateside sensibilities would be a crime.
British humor can be sophisticated or ridiculous, but there aren’t too many dark comedies on this list, which is what makes this Netflix original so interesting. Bleakly funny and heartbreakingly romantic, it follows Alex Lawther’s James, a pubescent self-described psychopath and his budding relationship with Alyssa (a terrific Jessica Barden) a runaway from a dysfunctional family. The two go on a kind of British Bonnie & Clyde crime spree that ends dramatically and, in season two, they’re forced to confront their feelings for each other and the futility of life. Really fun stuff, surprisingly.
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