TV Review: "Episodes"

Showtime brings Matt LeBlanc out of whatever hole he was hiding in since the demise of Joey to do what he does best: play himself.  Does it work as well as they had hoped?  Find out after the jump!

While I don't consider myself to be an anglophile of any kind, I do agree that when Americans attempt to co-opt British humor, something gets lost in translation.  There is a certain dry sensibility to the Brits' brand of laughs that simply doesn't land well with our American sensibilities.  Before people call me out as an elitist snob, I am not saying that this intrinsically makes English humor better than ours, but it is a decidedly different animal, and this is a problem of which Showtime's Episodes tries to make some sense.

The series opens with Sean and Barbara Lincoln having a domestic squabble in their home in LA, culminating in her storming out of the house and taking off down the road driving on the left, sending her careening straight in to Matt LeBlanc.  Admittedly, I had no idea what was going on at this point other than "marital squabble", but the flash to "seven weeks earlier" immediately afterwards led me to believe that this will probably be built up to over the course of the series and will make sense by the finale.

For now, we sit back and ponder the significance together.

After this abrupt introduction, we learn that Sean and Barbara are writers for a highly successful British TV show called Limon's Boys about a headmaster at a snooty prep school.  They are fresh off of their latest big award win when they are approached by a Hollywood producer named Merc Lapidus who tells them that he wants them to do an American version of their show that would be "like The Office, but... you know... your show".  Barbara is hesitant to take the deal, but Sean can hardly wait to start packing their bags to move to L.A.

Upon arriving in Hollywood, they find out that not only has Merc never seen their show, neither has anyone else at the studio, and they were only approached because they won a bunch of awards.  To top it all off, the studio has decided that they don't like their original actor for the lead (played by Richard Griffiths of the Harry Potter movies in a dryly amusing cameo) and instead want Matt LeBlanc, who is in need of the work in order to get the money to invest in a restaurant.

Can't imagine why finding work

was an issue for him...

From the descriptions of the action alone, the show doesn't sound like much, but the laughs come in a pretty truly British fashion from the awkwardness of the characters' interactions (one of the best being a scene where Matt LeBlanc regales Barbara with a story about a tourette's syndrome documentary that he found "hilarious").  Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig are amusing as Barbara and Leonard in their fish out of water roles and exhibit more awareness of their surroundings than your average cringe-humor characters.  The scenes where they meet with their team of agents in Hollywood had me bursting at the seams.  Matt LeBlanc is... well, you remember that show he was on, you may have heard of it, it was called Friends? Yeah, picture the one character he ever played, only now he says "fuck".

Still, I'd be lying if I said that this show didn't have me laughing for most of its first two episodes, and enjoy the way it uses what is becoming a tired trope of shows that go behind the scenes of fake programs to examine how humor can get lost in translation, even when you're speaking the same language.