Luke Owen reviews the first episode of Peep Show series 8…
There is a theory within television that the longer a TV show goes the less funny it becomes. After all, it’s hard to keep something fresh and original after a lengthy amount of time. While some American sitcoms seem to be able to get away with it (Friends, Fraiser etc.), British shows don’t seem to have the same luck. By the time Red Dwarf reached its eighth series, the show had become pretty stale and it wasn’t until recently (after a 13 year hiatus, Back to Earth notwithstanding) that it found its flair again. Now in its eighth series, Peep Show appears to have hit this barrier.
The last few series of Peep Show have been nothing but average at best and the last night’s episode, ‘Jeremy Therapised‘, did nothing to buck the trend. Don’t get me wrong, it had its funny lines and cringy moments, but the episode as a whole left no impact on me. I chuckled here and there, I never laughed out loud like I used to.
Mark is now trying to get the object of his affection Dobby to move in with him while trying to get Jeremy to move out. Super Hans is now “sold out” and has a real job which means the end of Jeremy’s band (apparently called 13 Bastards), and it seems that the always ill Gerard is working the sympathy vote to steal Dobby away from Mark. However that doesn’t work in his favour when he passes away of the flu.
As I said, there were some decent moments in the episode but it all felt so rushed. There was a plot thread of Mark having a job interview during Gerard’s funeral that didn’t really seem to go anywhere and could have lead to some excellent moments. Instead it was just dropped with a simple “I got the job” after buying a ‘wake cake’ to cover his tracks. Jeremy in therapy was probably the funniest moment of the episode with his long diatribe about how he thinks therapists work, which I imagine will lead to a series long storyline. But overall, there wasn’t anything brilliant, original or hilarious.
I do think that Peep Show has lost its edge. Going to back to classic episodes in the first few series when Mark was trying to get with co-worker Sophie had some belly aching laugh out loud moments. Last night’s episode? Not so much. Perhaps the writers should have taken the Spaced and The Inbetweeners approach to their characters and realised that ending after a couple of series would have been better rather than beating a dead horse.
Luke Owen is a freelance copywriter working for Europe’s biggest golf holiday provider as their web content executive.
Originally published November 26, 2012. Updated April 10, 2018.
