Come Fly With Me - Episode One

Come Fly With Me, starring Little Britain's David Walliams and Matt Lucas, aired on Christmas to an audience of around 10M (roughly the same as Doctor Who's overnights).

I like Lucas when he works with Reeves and Mortimer. I liked Walliams's contributions to Doctor Who Day 1999. However, I don't like them together* -- I've yet to finish an episode of Little Britain. I thought I'd try out Come Fly With Me to give the duo another chance.

Mockumentary style is nice, albeit trendy (I haven't tired of it... yet). No laugh track; we're off to a good start. Walliams and Lucas play all of the primary characters. That's the gimmick, that's part of the appeal, because people know and like Walliams and Lucas and half the fun (hence my use of the word gimmick) is seeing them skillfully inhabit vastly different characters.

(That doesn't happen on American television. One actor per role, 99 times out of 100. It occurred to me that, if the humor worked, a sketch show like CFWM that boasts a huge cast of characters might be quite successful here. A one-to-one actor to character ratio in the US would mean spotlight opportunities for many actors, because in a sketch show ideally no storyline is neglected (FlashForward, Glee, proving the point). Then again, where are any sketch shows in the US? Not on the air.)

The League of Gentlemen has infinite rewatch value, for me, because I love Gatiss, Pemberton, and Shearsmith. The actors I fell in love with keep me coming back. Walliams and Lucas hit the jackpot with Little Britain; the whole UK knows who they are. Their names don't even appear on screen until the end credits, because they don't need to be. Fans and curious viewers tuned in to CFWM because of name recognition and (probably) an extensive ad campaign by the BBC. Walliams and Lucas are big.

Unfortunately, CFWM's humor just doesn't work. CFWM's non-white characters are stereotypes, hardly characters at all. You can have a comedy that isn't nonstop laughs and is still a great show. This isn't the case here because CFWM doesn't have any depth (rounded characters) or sub-genre (TLOG's horror) to fall back on. It's just a comedy that isn't funny. A gimmick does not a successful comedy make, in the long term. Or even the short term.

* ETA: Actually, I thought Mash & Peas was decent. So I take that back.