IMHO: "Little Britain": Season One

Sunday night marked the end of the first season of HBO's British import Little Britain USA starring David Walliams and the out (and recently divorced) Matt Lucas. If you missed our original review of the series, the U.S. version added new characters as well as transported a number of the original characters stateside including Daffyd "the Only Gay in the Village" Thomas, as well as Vicki Pollard and the now British Prime Minister Sebastian Love.

I've always considered myself a bit of an Anglophile (Coupling is probably my favorite sitcom of all time) so I was actually quite looking forward to Little Britain's jump to America. But now that the first season is over, I'm less than thrilled with the results. In fact, I'm giving the show a down arrow for the first season. Read why after the jump.

Subtlety has never been a tool in the Little Britain toolbox, and there is nothing wrong with that in IMHO, although plenty of critics of the show have thought otherwise. Little Britain has also come under plenty of fire for sexism, homophobia, and pretty much every other "ism" and "phobia" you can name. Again, not something that particularly bothered me. I just can't get too riled up about a show making fun of fat homosexuals when it is created and written in part by a fat homosexual, and pretty much every other group ends up in the show's crosshairs at some point. And while I'm not a sixteen-year-old boy and don't have a sixteen-year-old boy's love of gross sight gags, I'm not bothered by it either.

What I can't forgive Little Britain USA for is far too often not being funny. It's a measure of how dull, repetitive and one-note too many of the characters were that this six episode season felt twice as long.

Matt Lucas as Marjorie Dawes

For example, Fatfighters' Majorie Dawes was funny in the first episode, thanks in part to the appearance of Rosie O'Donnell, but when the season finale basically repeated the skit's exact same premise — Marjorie calling one of the participants "fattie" over and over and over, not to mention the tired business of her not being able to understand a Spanish accent — my hand kept involuntarily reaching for the remote. Ditto Carol Beer saying "Computer says no", Bing Gordyn blathering on about the moon, and Senator White explaining his latest sexual "accident". 

Great sketch characters can be used repeatedly, but they need to evolve somehow lest they quickly grow boring — and over Little Britain's six episodes that kind of change hardly took place at all. Ellie Grace's super-saccharine exchange with her mother finally ended with her mother inappropriately uttering the name of a sexual device instead of Ellie Grace, and homoerotic gym buddies Mark and Tom underwent cosmetic surgery with rather shocking results, but for the most part the show just kept repeating vary slight variations of the joke again and again. That's just bad writing.

David Walliams as Ellie Grace's mother and Lucas as Ellie Grace

I'd also add that Matt Lucas is ten times better a performer than David Walliams. Lucas' range of characters is far wider and deeper than Walliams who too often just puts on a dress or bad make-up and basically does a different version of the two different characters he does best. Meanwhile, Lucas not only plays a far wider range of characters, but does so with a much greater degree of believability (his Ellie Grace is eerily childlike and his Andy is simply amazing).

But that's just my IMHO. What did you think? Did anyone else even watch?