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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Coupling

19:58 / 01.11.02

So, happened to catch one episode last week and nearly died of laughter. It was the one where Jeff(?) and Julie got together.

Brilliant, I thought, so I turned in for this evenings episode, which was the My name is Giselle one.

Are they as brilliant all the way through?

Finally something I look ofrward to on the telly, where the previous one was Central Park West some years ago - my God...

20:07 / 01.11.02

So far I have only been able to catch one episode. It was one where the blond girl finds out that her ex has a coset full of videos of him having sex with his exs, her included. Hillarious. I keep trying to catch the show but im usually out and taping The Shield.

21:42 / 01.11.02

'Coupling' has a few interesting twists - and some moderately innovative structural novelties - but I still find it approximately three parts irritating to two parts amusing. Jack Davenport's character, in particular, occasionally makes me want to claw out my inner ears...

00:03 / 02.11.02

That's right, bash the toff.

09:13 / 02.11.02

More like 'bash the irritatingly broadly-drawn stereotype'.

19:22 / 02.11.02

Like the weird welsh badger isn't satisfying any prejudices!

20:14 / 02.11.02

indeed ganesh, the way davenport sometimes delivers his lines gets on my tits but stereotype? is that not to be expected from a show that seems pretty close to farce ?

21:38 / 02.11.02

Davenport's overanxious 'I can't believe you just said that' character just seems too much like a modern(ish) rewriting of the socially-worried 'Terry & June' archetype...

14:35 / 04.11.02

Can't really speak to the stereotyping, but I do find it to be the funniest sit-com ever written. I have laughed out loud to that show more often than just about anything I've watched. My roommate fortunately snatches it off the internet from some nice brit who puts each episode online, so we don't experience too much seasonal lag.

The writer (Stephen Large?) is amazingly brilliant, even if his social commentary sometimes drifts from cutting edge to a little dated (then again it's not really my society so I could be completely off there).

15:49 / 04.11.02

I think it's ace too. I saw a whole season of it when I was still in Oz 1.5 - 2 years ago, and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Then about 6 months after that here in the UK I saw the same episodes, then didn't see it for ages. Then some time in the last year I randomly caught a couple of new ones which weren't that great but still worth a look in. My grasp of tv scheduling is fairly lame it must be said. How many seasons have there been?

But anyway, I don't think the stereotyping is much of a problem as it's petty hard to avoid in sitcoms. It's hard to structure a regular program without having recognizable characters like the conservative one or the quirky one. If you get too specific then it's really hard to revisit that same group week after week. You need a framework that is fairly simple that you can wipe clean each week to prepare for new hijinks. But within all that, I think there's a fair degree of subtlety and clever Seinfeldian kinds of writing that make each episode a self-contained unit, where in-jokes return again and again and almost everything that happens has some bearing on something else in the episode.

16:07 / 04.11.02

The writer is Steven Moffat I think. Didn't he do the Comic Relief thing a few years back with Rowan Atkinson as Doctor Who?

Rumor has Coupling coming to the US to replace Friends next season...

16:47 / 04.11.02

Singling out one character for attack is a bit unfair, considering that they're all completely unlikable.

14:24 / 05.11.02

The writer Steven Moffat’s done a number of things – Chalk (school-based comedy on BBC1) and Joking Apart (‘my wife left me’ –based series starring Robert ‘Cold Feet’ Bathurst, which was really quite good), and he says that a lot of the aspects of the show are based on experiences in the relationship between him and his partner Sue Vertue (have I got that right?), who produces the show. Hence the ‘central’ characters being called Steve and Susan.

I think it’s variable, but usually better than a lot of the stuff on UK TV (‘My Family’, for example), and some of the episodes have some neat tricks in – the one with Geoff and ‘Shadime’ (excuse phonetic spelling), where we see the same scene played out in separate languages by the same actors, but maintaining apparently identical mannerisms and reactions, was clever, as was ‘Split’, the first episode of the third (and latest) series, where the show was in a split-screen format which sometimes counterpointed actions and shifted emphasis for effect.

Granted, it’s just shown that rather common theme of the characters pairing off for no immediately apparent reason, and the Patrick and Sally characters don’t often get a lot of the good lines, but it’s often a bit different, and that’s not a bad thing.

Besides, it’s good to see that Gina Bellman’s working again – the Blackeyes fallout seemed to have put a brake on her career, which I thought was rather unjust.

DBC

20:34 / 05.11.02

Love this! It's so damn funny! Although, that said, the curent series is a huge let-down. It's nowhere near as funny as the last one. So basically, I just ignore what's going on until Jeff gives us another one of his women/breats/porn speeches.

23:17 / 05.11.02

Gina Bellman's character, it must be said, is one of the most irritating on television.

I'd agree that 'Coupling' is head-and-shoulders above most sitcoms but in many ways it follows hackneyed old gender traditions (men are blokeish and committment-phobic; women are insecure and needy). The narrative techniques are moderately fresh and it's a nice aperitif to 'The Office' but I remain mystified as to why it's causing so many to blow their comedic muck...

00:53 / 06.11.02

Because it's funny...

02:00 / 06.11.02

The Welsh guy is really, really good. The episode where he lied about having one leg made me laugh, in a good old-fashioned way, better than 'Friends', say, or 'Frasier' (which has the advantage of being good) ever have.

07:15 / 06.11.02

Coupling's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me in that it it adumbrates all the things I hate about British sitcoms - 2D 'characters' hamming it up real good - and yet I find myself laughing at it more so the, say, Friends.

Coupling is formally innovative, but the real reason I suspect Ilike it and Frasier over, say, Friends is that the basic comedy engine in both cases is farce. Both are backed up by verbal comedy, (which in Coupling tends to consist of Jeff saying "That's when Non-Verbal Breast Communication comes into play" or somesuch, which I'm not a big fan of) but at the end of the day most of the laughs are characters hiding in cupboards, misunderstanding relationships, covering up small lies with big lies etc.

I suppose I'm just a big fan of vicars' trousers falling down.

07:50 / 06.11.02

It is indeed the new 'Terry and June'...

07:57 / 06.11.02

What I like about it is that the form is related to the laughs. Friends for example is merely a string of one liners, and the characters and plot seem to exist only in order to provide thin excuses for the list of one liners that was written before-hand.

Whereas a half-decent sitcom like Seinfeld or Frasier or indeed Coupling when it's at its best, draws the laughs from comedy based on the situation, giving more resonance to the one liners.

And yeah the characters can be annoying sometimes, but they're not nearly as smarmy as most other sitcoms, so it's ahead by default.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:08 / 06.11.02

I find it unwatchably dreadful, but have managed to get through the credits without bleeding from every orifice, suggesting it is at least better than My Family, which was a blood-puking fiasco.

However, this is no great commendation. Drinking my dead aunt's bathwater is better than My Family. How does it hold up against, say, How Do You Want Me?

Fascinating to see how Americans and Brits seem to react to it very differently, though....

Moffat is an interesting one - if Chalk is the one I'm thinking of, it too was rooted heavily in farce, including a positively byzantine setup to the punchline "I've just creamed my trousers", and even Joking Apart featured at least two lengthy hiding-behind-sofas routines.

However, it did have some mordantly brilliant moments, like the confession of adultery on his soon to be ex-wife's part as all their friends are concealed about the room waiting to leap out for a surprise birthday party.

"What do you want?"

"I want to hear you say it. I want you to tell me that you are an adultress."
"All right...I am an adultress."

"Right, everybody, out you come, party's over."

Mighty. Works in real life too.

08:17 / 06.11.02

I'm still trying to work out if this thread is a joke or not? I'm suprised that anyone likes this, maybe I haven't given it a proper watch but what I've seen of it I haven't liked. Have to stick up a little for 'My Family' though I've watched it a couple of times but I think that's mainly because I'm still trying to work out what kind of creature the mother is

At least that awful Jasper Carrot show was cancelled.

09:29 / 06.11.02

Coupling is a brilliant show! The third series hasn't been quite as good as series 2 but I was still laughing my tits off!

Someone raised the point above about Fraiser being farce and Friends being witty one liners. I read somewhere (and I can't remember where) the difference between american and british sitcoms described as american sitcoms having bizarre situations happening to normal people (eg Church being knocked down before Ross and Emilys wedding, etc) where as British sitcoms have normal things happen to eccentric characters (eg Basil Fawlty preparing for a health inspector). Fraiser has often been described as being very British in humour. American sitcom heroes come across as sharpwitted and sometimes intelligent where as British sitcom heores come across as stupid bumbling fools. Maybe its because it makes Americans feel good since they aspire to be like their TV heroes whereas Brits feel better about themselves after seeing characters as flawed or more flawed than themselves. Or is it the case of the American TV producers thinking their audience want hansome, witty people on their screens when this is not the case? Americans seem to love British comedys afterall.

I've made a number of generalisations in this post and am aware that not all Americans or Brits have the same personalities or opinions, but how close do you reckon the analysis of comedy is to the "general" people of said countries?

10:52 / 06.11.02

yet I find myself laughing at it more so the, say, Friends.

Really not that difficult. I find myself laughing at burn victims more than I do Friends. There's a solid connection between the two shows, anyway; when Coupling started, it was set up as the British Friends. That alone is reason to hate it.

11:08 / 06.11.02

Maybe its because it makes Americans feel good since they aspire to be like their TV heroes whereas Brits feel better about themselves after seeing characters as flawed or more flawed than themselves.

Didn't Aristotle say that characters in tragedies are better than us and characters in comedies are worse than us? Does that make American sitcoms tragic and British sitcoms true comedies?

12:23 / 07.11.02

Really not that difficult. I find myself laughing at burn victims more than I do Friends. There's a solid connection between the two shows, anyway; when Coupling started, it was set up as the British Friends. That alone is reason to hate it.

That gets even funnier when you know that Hollywood is currently making an American version of Coupling. Unless they bring over some of the original scipts, the show'll liable to look exactly like friends.

16:07 / 07.11.02

Well, it MAY well end up like Friends, but…

(Taken from http://www.chortle.co.uk, Sept 19 2002)

Many British sitcoms - from Absolutely Fabulous to Men Behaving Badly - have fared badly in transatlantic translation as nervous network bosses tone down the characters' excesses.
But NBC - which is making a pilot in the hope of finding a hit comedy to replace Friends - is keen to maintain the spirit of the original.
Writer Steven Moffat said: "At the moment they want it to be very like the British show, with all its bad language and post-watershed rudeness. I'll be interested to see how it develops."
But he insisted the show is a different proposition from Friends.
He added: "As far as the comparisons with Friends are concerned, there's a central relationship and its satellites of best friends and ex's which happens to add up to six people - but Coupling is a boozier, smokier, more shag infested series, and very British in that sense.”

But then again, they said such hopeful things about the US version of Red Dwarf, I seem to recall. Hmmm.

And wasn't 'Cold Feet' sold as the UK version of Friends as well ?

Finally : I seem to recall that Fred Barron, the chap behind 'My Family' (which I was unkind to earlier - mainly because it pains me to see the two leads, both of whom can be very good indeed, doing such uninspired material) used to be executive producer of Seinfeld and the Larry Sanders Show...just thought I'd throw that into the subdebate about the differences between UK and US comedy.

DBC

16:35 / 07.11.02

Is there a real difference, though? Isn't it just that My Family is shit and Larry Sanders was good?

I don't know about Aristotle, but the traditional cliche has it that decent comedy (well, situation comedy) is just a step away from tragedy. Prime example? Steptoe & Son.

Goodness Gracious Meme

17:00 / 07.11.02

Gawd. I hate this program... comparisons with Friends are ridiculous, at the same stage (first couple of series) Friends, despite obvious annoying aspirational stuff, was bloody funny, and not bad on interpersonal dynamics. Yeah, actually, the composition is quite interesting, but i can never bear to watch it for long enough to get any benefits. They're all so bloody punchable.

Coupling is a sit-com that's crashed into a pantomime cow and taken the bottom half with it. The gender politics make Friends look like Macho Sluts, eg a fave moment of mine from an early friends episode:

Phoebe spots a girl ogling Chandler, takes a breath, hrmphs, puts her hands on her belt loops and says, in a deep voice 'Dude, like, totally hot babe checking *you* out'. Then grins and walks off, saying 'Hey, think I'm ready for my penis now'.

Now imagine this as done by the Coupling crew. Yeuch.

And yeah, they smoke and drink and shag. Big deal. In the UK at least, this isn't original or edgy. This Life anyone?

Jack The Bodiless

17:18 / 07.11.02

...which also starred Jack Davenport, who's much better when he's not flouncing around with a perpetually 'I've-just-wet-the-bed' expression on his face.

It's beautifully put together but appallingly acted - written by someone who really knows how to construct comedy, but has no real idea how to incorporate that into how human relationships actually work, and so relies on gender stereotyping that verges on the bigoted. It pulls off the unusual trick of being clever as fuck and dumb as fuck at the same time. It's entirely cutting edge, while all of the dated ideas are rooted in the seventies sitcoms that BBC1 used to throw up on a regular basis. Very odd. A trumph of style over content, is my considered opinion. Also a guilty pleasure... I really enjoy it, but feel strangely dirty for doing so, and not in the usual fun manner.

miss spooky, on the other hand, thinks it's trash. But then we both think The Office is ridiculously overwritten and garishly over the top nonsense. I've worked in a bleeding office for six years, and I'm sorry, but it's not cleverly observed or arch, it's just vaguely creepy.

18:23 / 07.11.02

Cold Feet isn't anything like Friends, except that they share an actress. It's got much more in common with Ally McBeal. I can't imagine the US version of Coupling being any good - although on NBC it at least has a chance, with Scrubs suggesting they're willing to move away from formulaic pap at last.

We could be here all day debating if Coupling is funny or not (and I suspect the arguments have as much to do with whether one thinks s/he is "too cool" to admit to liking it as the level of humor itself), but smart or stupid, the thing makes me laugh my ass off and in that, it is a triumphant sitcom.

18:56 / 07.11.02

Spot on, Laurence. I'm too cool to lower myself to admitting that, actually, I secretly find it side-splitting. Yeah. That'd be it.

19:13 / 07.11.02

On The Office - the main problem that I've had with this second series has been that the writing has fallen back on painting the characters as extremely broad stereotypes, making the oft-heard claims of realism and accuracy a bit of a joke. I think it redeemed itself with the final episode, though, moving the characters away from being one-dimensional monsters and letting them be a little more human.

20:12 / 07.11.02

I'm too cool to lower myself to admitting that, actually, I secretly find it side-splitting. Yeah. That'd be it.

Well, a lot of people slag off Friends but somehow seem to have seen every episode...

20:12 / 07.11.02

I don't know, Randy. You are pretty cool....