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Jul. 20th, 2021 10:23 pmRecently my housemate has become obsessed with BBC's The Goes Wrong Show (to my understanding a follow-up on the live theater show The Play That Goes Wrong, which I've never seen), so over the past month that's been most of what we've watched in this house.
The premise is that we-the-audience are watching an amateur theater company with ambitions somewhat beyond their scope attempting to successfully make it through to the end of a performance regardless of the set and prop malfunctions unleashing physical comedy all around them. Each episode is a half-hour short play that in itself is a take-off on a particular genre; the WWII spy drama, the legal thriller, and the period romance in particular are all extremely funny. This clip from the period romance does a pretty good job of showing the kind of escalating physical comedy that makes up most of the show, though it's also worth watching the British cast grimly attempt a Tennessee Williams pastiche. I just spent about a half hour trying to find a clip of my favorite scene in the whole show, which involves an actor playing a fax machine, but no one appears to have wanted to spoil it so I can only recommend you watch "The Pilot (Not The Pilot)" yourself.
Each of the recurring cast members of the show plays the same actor-character with the same amateur-theater-company quirks that come through regardless of the character they're playing in any individual show (there's the one who can't remember lines, the one who constantly breaks character to repeat a gag and get second laugh, the one who's got a particular Blue Steel look that she directs towards the audience at every opportunity, etc.) There are also two longer specials -- a Peter Pan show and a Christmas Carol show -- but these are marred imo by the need to fill out the time by shoehorning in subplots relating to interpersonal offstage conflict between the actors (conversations accidentally broadcast over the loudspeaker, greenscreen effects replaced with incriminating videos, etc.) that ramp up the secondhand embarrassment levels to a horrible degree, whereas the half-hour shows are perfectly filled out just with the simple drama of the cast desperately attempting to soldier through to the end of today's play.
Anyway, they're all free to watch with ads on tubitv, which I don't fully understand as a platform but does occasionally provide me with television I can't find elsewhere and don't want to pay Amazon for, so if you're jonesing for the slapstick of The Theater at its worst/best this is an easy and enjoyable way to get a fix!
The premise is that we-the-audience are watching an amateur theater company with ambitions somewhat beyond their scope attempting to successfully make it through to the end of a performance regardless of the set and prop malfunctions unleashing physical comedy all around them. Each episode is a half-hour short play that in itself is a take-off on a particular genre; the WWII spy drama, the legal thriller, and the period romance in particular are all extremely funny. This clip from the period romance does a pretty good job of showing the kind of escalating physical comedy that makes up most of the show, though it's also worth watching the British cast grimly attempt a Tennessee Williams pastiche. I just spent about a half hour trying to find a clip of my favorite scene in the whole show, which involves an actor playing a fax machine, but no one appears to have wanted to spoil it so I can only recommend you watch "The Pilot (Not The Pilot)" yourself.
Each of the recurring cast members of the show plays the same actor-character with the same amateur-theater-company quirks that come through regardless of the character they're playing in any individual show (there's the one who can't remember lines, the one who constantly breaks character to repeat a gag and get second laugh, the one who's got a particular Blue Steel look that she directs towards the audience at every opportunity, etc.) There are also two longer specials -- a Peter Pan show and a Christmas Carol show -- but these are marred imo by the need to fill out the time by shoehorning in subplots relating to interpersonal offstage conflict between the actors (conversations accidentally broadcast over the loudspeaker, greenscreen effects replaced with incriminating videos, etc.) that ramp up the secondhand embarrassment levels to a horrible degree, whereas the half-hour shows are perfectly filled out just with the simple drama of the cast desperately attempting to soldier through to the end of today's play.
Anyway, they're all free to watch with ads on tubitv, which I don't fully understand as a platform but does occasionally provide me with television I can't find elsewhere and don't want to pay Amazon for, so if you're jonesing for the slapstick of The Theater at its worst/best this is an easy and enjoyable way to get a fix!
