Thirties, Teachers and Ted

Thanks to Rob Buckley for pointing out the latest career move of a British comedy talent. Peter Serafinowicz, co-creator of science spoof Look Around You, will be appearing in a new American sitcom, Our Thirties.

Serafinowicz plays a British guy who moved to the US to pick up girls - in the UK, he’s nothing special; in the US, he’s that exotic foreigner with the accent. Trouble is, he’s falling in love with a bartender who doesn’t want to know him - mainly because he’s forgotten about their one-night-stand 11 years previously.

Rob’s review, based on an initial screener (the show hasn’t aired yet in the US, and — for the time being, at least — hasn’t been picked up by any UK networks), is pretty scathing of the cast, bar Serafinowicz himself. “If they can somehow make this the Peter Serafinowicz show,” he writes, “instead of an even-hander between seven not desperately interesting, not terribly convincing characters, it’ll do well.”

As he points out, the last British actor to try and break into US sitcom land was Coupling’s Sarah Alexander, whose role in Teachers lasted three episodes until the show was cancelled. Then again, taking Channel 4’s comedy drama as source material and turning it into a studio-bound sitcom was, some would say, bound to failure anyway.

Famously, of course, Coupling itself tried and failed to make the transition Stateside — another inevitable failure, as Stephen Moffatt’s intelligent scripts that often play with the conventions of television fell flat at the hands of a miscast troupe and audience expectations that this series would be “the next Friends”.

And yet, a couple of years on, America has shown that it can do a Coupling-style show, and sell it back to the UK. How I Met Your Mother is currently showing on Sunday evenings on BBC2, with BBC Three a week ahead on Monday evenings. Once you get past the show’s contrived situation (a father in the year 2030 telling his children how he met, er, their mother), you end up with a fun comedy that is a cut above most in the genre. Like Stephen Moffatt’s masterpiece, HIMYM is also showing that it’s not afraid to deviate from conventional sitcom structure. For example, Sunday’s episode, The Pineapple Incident, sees lead character Ted wake up after an alcohol-fuelled night that he has no memory of. Over the course of the episode, as his friends take turns in filling him in on what he get up to, we see differing reconstructions of the night in flashback. The gradual build-up of alternative stories doesn’t quite match some of Moffatt’s genius plotting for Coupling, but it’s pleasant enough for a Sunday evening show.