March is here, and with it some of the brightest stars in the whole media landscape, slumming it on the grotty old television. Daisy May Cooper and Donald Glover, at least, aren’t strangers to the medium, but you may have to pinch yourself when you hear what Mel Brooks is getting up to.
Here are the biggest new TV shows of March 2023.
What’s New On TV In March 2023
1. History of the World, Part II | March 6th, 2023
The recent news that John Cleese – atrophying goodwill and now helplessly addicted to Twitter – would take a stab at a Fawlty Towers revival filled the air with groans. About the only thing that could show him up any worse would be Mel Brooks, similarly ancient but having managed not to piss all over his own legacy, turning up to remind us all of how it’s done.
It’s been over forty years since the release of History of the World: Part I, whose numbered title was originally meant as a joke. That first part was a film, but done as a string of unconnected skits, each covering one of the world’s more pivotal moments – a format which lends itself quite naturally to an anthology show, with Brook’s sheer cachet having filled the cast with the kind of big names it’s still surprising to see on television (a full list of whom would handily eat up the rest of my word count).
Is Brooks likely to revive his old habit of playing multiple characters himself? Possibly, although pushing 96 will severely limit the historical figures he could credibly play. If Methuselah turns up in the credits we all know who’ll be taking that role.
2. Rain Dogs | March 6th, 2023
Given Daisy May Cooper’s track record, merely bringing her in as an actor rather than turning her loose on the script seems a little like only using the hob and never using the oven. However, her kind of quiet exasperation is perfect for a role like this, a single mother who hits the skids with her young daughter in tow.
(Though the daughter will have a tall order following Lenny Rush, Cooper’s onscreen son in Am I Being Unreasonable?.)
Rain Dogs is drawn from creator Cash Carraway’s own experiences as a single mother, with it having displaced the planned TV adaptation of her autobiographical book Skint Estate. For my money, the most interesting detail is the involvement of Ade Edmondson, who is best known for dark comedy but usually of a more slapstick and cartoony kind than this.
3. Swarm | March 17th, 2023
There’s always been something of the swarmlike to how people treat celebrities, turning up en masse to crowd around them, and probably eat them if not prevented from doing so. Here, the swarm of the title is shorthand for the fans of a definitely-not-Beyonce pop star, but it starts to stray into the literal with a bit of a bee motif that seems to suggest the main character is actually going to sting someone.
Swarm represents Donald Glover taking the darker side of showbusiness he was already exploring in Atlanta and running with it, although you wouldn’t have to cast around too much to come up with the idea of a dangerously obsessed fan. That’s been happening since the 1840s and Listzomania, although it has clearly been kicked into overdrive by all our modern conveniences.
It’s hard to say exactly how obsessive and mental Dominique Fishback’s superfan is going to get, but one thing’s for sure – the only person in more danger than the pop star themselves can only be anyone who thinks for a moment they can possibly be a bigger fan than her.
4. Lucky Hank | March 19th, 2023
The advice ‘write what you know’ is said to be why the literary scene is eternally plagued by books about English professors hitting mid-life crises and contemplating having an affair. Lucky Hank’s synopsis puts it in the classic mould of that kind of story – head of the English department, small rural college, actually involves a mid-life crisis, blah blah blah.
About the one thing saving it from exploding in the hangar is the presence of Bob Odenkirk as the lead. Off the back of the universally beloved Better Call Saul, he has both the charm and cachet to do anything he wants. This was basically the only reason for the existence of 2021’s Nobody, a fairly silly popcorn flick in which Odenkirk showed off his chops as an action hero and, somehow, made it believable.
Lucky Hank is adapted from a novel – bizarrely, not Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, the go-to comedy version of the excruciating nature of academia, but Richard Russo’s book Straight Man. As I say, this is not the kind of story that’s in particularly short supply.
5. Digman | March 22nd, 2023
Having exorcised all his material about Die Hard through the lengthy run of Brooklyn 99, Andy Samberg returns to the well of riffing on beloved late-20th-century action flicks with a cartoon spoof of Indiana Jones. Samberg voices the main character, actually called Rip Digman, which is pretty much throwing down the gauntlet as to the kind of tone this will be taking.
By now, Doctor Jones is firmly within the patheon of recognisable stock characters, to the point where real archaeologists presumably half-expect to be handed a fedora and bullwhip upon graduation. This is always crucial to any sort of parody, but not in and of itself enough. F
ortunately, the other vital part – as our old friend Mel Brooks could tell us – is understanding why the original was so beloved in the first place, and if Samberg isn’t a lifelong Indy fan then I would be incredibly surprised.
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