Thursday, April 13, 2006
Just before we go...
COMEDY! Significant Others, Living TV, 9.30pm
We ended up watching this almost by accident last week - we'd been watching the frankly bizarre live episode of Will & Grace, this happened to be on right afterwards and we were struck by that useful combination of being sufficiently interested to keep watching and entirely too lazy to fetch the remote control and see what else was on. The fortunate outcome was that this was actually pretty good - it centres around a set of couples who are attending couples therapy, and for part of the episode you see them with their therapist (who sits behind the camera, so we never actually see them, giving it a very postmodern confessional-type feel) and for the rest you see them trying to put what they've learned into practice.
Doesn't sound thrilling, does it? Ah, but the joy is in the execution. The show is partly improvised so there's a lot of great natural interaction between the actors, and some superb comedy set-pieces. We especially liked the scene last week where one woman bargained with her boyfriend (husband?) that if he came with her to see the OB-GYN to discuss her pregnancy, he could buy some shiny white new tennis shoes, only for a woman's waters to break all over his nice new shoes when they got there. Again, doesn't sound like classic comedy, but the delivery was great.
We found ourselves quite wanting to punch one of the male characters, but every comedy deserves a classic antagonist, right? The scene where he took it upon himself to ask around the viewers at his wife's gallery opening how many people they'd slept with (having learnt that his wife had slept with "a coupla hundred") was priceless, especially when his wife cottoned on and got involved in the argument. It's probably not a show that's to everybody's taste and it's more in the mould of say, The Comeback than it is, say, Friends. But if slightly offbeat comedy is your thing, you could do far worse. Trust us. We've watched a lot of awful comedy.
And with that, we're taking the Easter Weekend off, because we're lazy fuckers. See you next Tuesday!
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