Peep Show Series 1 – 5: DVD Review

Boxed Collection of All Five Seasons of the Cult British Sitcom

Jan 12, 2009 Rowan Darby

Ever wondered what crippling anxieties you ought to be harbouring between adolescence and middle age? Allow Mark and Jeremy to demonstrate over all thirty episodes.

At first glance 2003 wasn’t the most fertile year for British comedy. Ricky Gervais put a permanent lid on The Office, Steve Coogan was on long term hiatus after a second series of Alan Partridge, and My Family was still going strong. It was with little fanfare that a brand new contender eased its way into the Channel 4 schedules.

Peep Show follows the daily grind of two twenty-something flatmates living and, with various degrees of success, loving in South London. Mark (David Mitchell) is a pompous, socially inept middle manager with a penchant for rules, regime and military history. Jeremy (Robert Webb) is his freeloading friend from their student days – selfish, arrogant, and with devastatingly hopeless delusions of his own musical genius and sexual allure. With a supporting cast of workmates, love interests and drug-addled friends the pair must negotiate the minutiae and pitfalls of 21st Century urban survival.

P. O. V. Camera Work

This show’s shtick, to which its title refers, is that the audience not only view proceedings from the protagonists’ point of view but are also privy to their innermost musings, no matter how sordid or mundane. Far from being merely a gimmick this allows the plot of each episode to move along at a believable pace while leaving the humour and exposition to Mark and Jeremy’s inner voices. Just prepare yourself for some erratic camera work.

What really works about Peep Show is that its writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, pay no attention to the moral development and welfare of their characters. Each one behaves with realistic degrees of callousness and self interest. If you see two of them hugging, it’s usually because one of them has got drunk and slept with the other’s girlfriend/sister/mother-in-law. This makes it even more touching when there is genuine tenderness between Mark and Jeremy, as it feels like an organic friendship, rather than the pre-packaged bundles of emotion bandied around by the majority of sitcoms.

Falling Standards

That’s not to say that Peep Show is without its faults. Perhaps the most fatal aspect of collecting all five series together is that it highlights the slipping standards in seasons 4 and 5. This may have a lot to do with the swelling budget afforded to Bain and Armstrong as the series started to gain recognition. While the early seasons were often confined to a handful of locations the later ones saw Mark and Jeremy step out of their flat more frequently and embark on increasingly audacious adventures.

Compare Jeremy and bandmate Super Hans’ claustrophobic and moribund attempts to establish their techno outfit in Series 1 with their playing at a Christian rock festival in Series 5. The bigger sets and bigger budgets result in the humour being more obvious and less acute. That said it’s a forgivable criticism when one considers that a bad episode of Peep Show is more achingly funny than most other sitcoms on a good day. The writers have simply damned themselves by setting the standards so high in the first three series.

Target Audience

The other pertinent issue is exactly who this collection is aimed at. Peep Show has always attracted notoriously low viewing figures – barely scraping past a million even after a slew of high profile awards. Almost mirroring the Family Guy fiasco it was cancelled after the third series until television executives noticed the inordinately high DVD sales and ushered it back into the fold.

This means that anyone with even a passing interest in the series ought to have at least a couple of the DVDs already making this boxed set an expensive way of completing the collection. And although each season’s extras, which are of an unusually high quality for this genre, are reproduced in full the compilation offers no unique bonuses of its own.

Ultimately this is an entirely superfluous release for anyone who has ever sneezed near an episode of Peep Show in the past, but a welcome and comparatively inexpensive introduction to the uninitiated.

The copyright of the article Peep Show Series 1 – 5: DVD Review in British/Australian TV is owned by Rowan Darby. Permission to republish Peep Show Series 1 – 5: DVD Review in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Peep Show

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Comments

Feb 13, 2009 12:48 PM

slinkster :

nice article, although I disagree slightly to as to why series 4 and 5 went downhill. It was partly I feel because they had too many great characters and started to write them into the script even when they didn't have a role to play. For example cramming Big Suze and Superhans in where they didn't really fit. I actually liked the fact that Mark and Jez got out and about... although, for different reasons than you propose, I think it did have an adverse effect. The main one being they had to come up with really ludicrous explanations as to why they would end up in the same location. Also it got a bit too silly at times... you could never really believe in Mark coming up with absolutely nothing for that presentation right? Fundamentally you have to be able to 'buy in' to the situation to appreciate the comedy.

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