Woot Watches: Peep Show

Monday, August 1, 2011

For reasons that are probably obvious, the comedy of embarrassment and social ineptitude really resonates with me: Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, that sort of thing. And I’m also way into the better British sitcoms, like Saxondale, The Thick Of It, and The Office again. So how come, even though it’s been on since 2003, I never knew about Peep Show until a few weeks ago?…

While it offers certain logistical advantages, it’s not generally a good idea to do your grocery shopping on your way to a party.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb – who you may know from their excellent sketch-comedy show, That Mitchell & Webb Look – play Mark and Jeremy, roommates in South London. While the chubby, nerdy Mark holds down a desk at an agonizingly dull loan company and soothes his failure with women by immersing himself in World War II trivia, Jeremy imagines himself as a world-class ladies’ man and an undiscovered dance-music production genius who’s always one break away from stardom.

But under it all they’re both uncertain, insecure, and eager to please the people around them, which generates an almost infinite variety of squirm-inducing hilarity. The characters who are happy and well-adjusted are the ones who are closest to just being themselves – something that Mark and Jeremy are too socially cowardly to grasp. The show’s main visual conceit (and the source of its title) is that much of the show is seen through the eyes of one or the other main character. So a lot of the show is shot in tight close-ups on faces, for an intimacy that makes everything that much more uncomfortable. Inner voice-over monologues show us even more about the self-deceptions and pretensions that bedevil Mark and Jeremy. Again, the problem isn’t who they are – it’s who they’re pretending to be at any given moment.

I don’t want to give too much away, and the compounding deceptions and misunderstandings of each episode are too complex (and NSFW) to lend themselves to summarizing in a sentence, or a YouTube clip. Just get over to Hulu and start watching all 42 episodes free – if you can stand it. Maybe someday we’ll see David Mitchell host the Oscars, too.

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