TV series review

We first watched this winning slice of life comedy back a few years ago.  It's about a guy from London who meets and falls in love with a gal from Wales.  Their friends and family move in and out of their lives as they navigate getting engaged, getting married, and then the trials of trying to have a baby.  We share their ups, downs, and the foibles of their quirky friends and family.  It's a double fish out of water comedy that is immensely fun and entertaining.  We laughed out loud during every episode of the show.

The only problem was they never aired series 2 of it over here in the USA and they never released it on DVD.  BBC America did show series 3 but they didn't release it on DVD.  And we never got to see the mandatory Christmas episode, all successful BBC shows do an hour long Christmas episode.  So we saw series 1, have the DVD which means we've watched it multiple times, never saw series2, and saw series 3 once.  But all that changed when I signed up for a free trial of Amazon Prime via our Roku.  While looking at the shows we could watch for free for a month I noticed that they were offering Gavin and Stacey 2, the Christmas special, and the third series for unlimited streaming.  Well quicker than President Obama can sell out his progressive base, we began to watch all the ones we'd missed and or seen only once.

And we loved them.    Ruth Jones and James Corden, who star in and wrote the show, are fantastic.  They're just the type of people who would never be allowed to star in or write comedies like this for US television.  Rob Brydon as the awkward Uncle Bryn steals every scene he's in.  Julia Davis and Adrian Scarborough are divine as the long time married couple who are either desperately in love or having the most vicious fights ever.  Margaret John as the elderly sexpot Doris is a hoot.  And the leads Joanna Page and Matthew Horne are cute and winning.

The two other series are as well written and acted as the first one is.  I highly recommend this show.  It's exactly the kind of show that would never ever get made or appear on US television and it's the kind that the BBC does so well.  It's a crying shame they never released all of it over here on DVD but it's available on Amazon Prime for you to watch on your computer or other streaming device. 

TV on DVD round up

We've been enjoying The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency like crazy. (It's available from our local library, see my previous post for a shout out to the good folks over there at the JCPL.) This HBO/BBC co production is a thing of beauty. The performances are smashing and the scenery is super as well. It's filmed on location in Botswana and it's filled with African actors, although an African American plays the title role.

I read the first two books in the series but I bailed on the third one because they were a bit too twee and precious for my taste. However the stories are perfectly fitted to being told on screen. And this adaption tells them very well. I love how they've adapted them and as soon as I saw that Richard Curtis wrote the first episode, he wrote most of the Vicar of Dibley series, co wrote three out of four series of Blackadder, and also wrote Love Actually, I knew I was going to be in good hands. All of the seven episodes of this series are well written, well acted, and well shot.

Jill Scott is terrific as the 'traditionally' built title character. I also love the bundle of uptightness that is Anika Noni Rose as her assistant and secretary. I'm not even done watching all the episodes in this series and I'm already itching for the next ones to come out so I can see them as well.
I can't imagine a more perfect contemporary Brit-com than Gavin and Stacey. This show is a slice of life about two people who meet through work and who fall in love soon after. Their story is complicated by their friends and family and the trials of modern life and somehow it's all a winsome winning laugh out loud wonderful series.

I'm in love with this show and it's going into our pantheon of British comedies that we watch over and over again. The two female leads in this show, Joanna Page and Ruth Jones, stand out and they really make it worth watching. Also great are Rob Brydon and Allison Steadman, as Stacey's uncle and Gavin's mom.
My good friend XUP mentioned that Hamish Macbeth was another good series from the BBC that is set in a small rural location. So I picked up the first series on DVD for a Christmas present for Sparky, she loves the BBC slice of life comedies set in small rural towns, and I'm happy to report that we both really like this show now. The accents take a bit of getting used to, they're very thick and almost unintelligible at times, but by and large this one is a winner. It's ostensibly a mystery series but the mysteries aren't like the ones we're used to from American TV, they're slice of life stories that feature a minor petty crime that gets solved while the story is being told. It's more about the town and the coterie of Scottish oddballs who live in it than it is about crime and crime solving, in fact Hamish Macbeth is probably the most lax policeman character I've ever seen on a BBC series. And that's what makes it so engaging.

Oh yeah, it also features my Scottish adopted actor Shirley Henderson as well, so it's got that going for it as well.