This March is probably a bit of a cheat for the TV industry, since thanks to the Coronavirus – and I’m trying not to be flippant about this – more and more people are finding themselves stuck in the house.
1. Breeders | March 2
We’ve all been burned before by trying out a show purely on the strength of the people involved. Disenchantment, reuniting the old Futurama crew, really had no right being as bad as it was. But, dare I say, the combination of Simon Blackwell (Peep Show writer), Chris Addison (The Thick Of It star and Veep director) and Martin Freeman (Dr. Watson) is still enough to fill me with hope after many, many, many disappointments over the years.
Blackwell is the lynchpin here, and that’s down to his work on Peep Show. By the end of that, the cast and crew were showing their age, along with the narrative: David Mitchell’s Mark Corrigan had a child, but didn’t quite know what to do with it, using it more like a breathing prop than a character. More to the point, fatherhood seemed to have next to no effect on Mark. Breeders, as a comedy about parenthood, seems like a chance to rectify that folly.
Interestingly, this isn’t new territory for Freeman. Global audiences will know him best as the hobbit from The Hobbit, but a lot of his early work was with this kind of British comedy show. Most notable of these was the original The Office, but before that in 2000 he was part of the sketch ensemble Bruiser, alongside a very young David Mitchell, Robert Webb, and Olivia Colman. One of the stronger runners from this had Freeman and Colman as a married couple, eternally troubled by Freeman’s obsession-of-the-week: add a child to that setup and you’re halfway to pitching Breeders already.
2. Dave | March 4
A natural fit for Britain’s questionably-named aggregator channel Dave, Dave (the show) is a vehicle for the also questionably-named comedy rapper Lil Dicky (born Dave Burd). Dicky’s shtick revolves around the oddity of him, an upper-middle-class Jewish man, breaking into the rap scene, a genre rooted in the black American underclass – although now he has his own show he’s evidently succeeded. Dicky uses this contrast to spin himself as something of an everyman, someone on the outside of the rap industry looking in.
Dicky isn’t the first rapper to break into TV and won’t be the last – and not the first or last comedy rapper either, considering that Andy Samberg went from doing online music videos with The Lonely Island to fronting Brooklyn 99. We can only hope Dicky won’t be too quick to branch out into an ill-conceived dating show which he will front while wearing a wall clock and top hat, as ‘Dicky Of Love’ may even now be a title gone too far.
3. Zerozerozero | March 6
The advice in writing is ‘show, don’t tell’, and that’s how some of the finest montages out there came to be: putting the story not quite on pause, but simply taking a moment and revelling in the display of things happening. This principle is also the main appeal of the documentary – and of Zerozerozero, a chronicle of the everyday life of a shipment of cocaine.
But for that pesky, niggling detail of the cocaine trade being illegal, this is the kind of thing that likely would have been a documentary. Vice have probably floated the idea before, and you can bet that the grandiose types attracted to a career as a drug lord wouldn’t be against it. But both those projects run the eternal risk of losing focus on the actual subject in favour of what would admittedly be a very lively host. An adaptation of a book by Robert Saviano, the man behind the Mafia expose Gomorrah, is by nature a more sober approach.
The strongest part of the mid-2000s Nicholas Cage vehicle Lord Of War was the intro, which followed a single bullet from its initial manufacture, through the topsy-turvy world of global freight, to its final destination of being fired directly into a man’s face. I can only imagine Zerozerozero will be much the same – certainly with a similar final destination.
4. The Plot Against America | March 16
Alternate history – fascist takeover of America – you may be thinking ‘wait, haven’t I seen this before?’ The difference between this and The Man In The High Castle is that while that show depicted America falling to the Nazis after WWII goes badly wrong, The Plot Against America has the US succumbing to an entirely home-grown strain of fascism, under President Charles ‘Lucky Lindy’ Lindbergh.
He’s no Huey Long, but as speculative fiction goes, Lindy isn’t a ridiculous choice to take on this role. He’s best known as the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, or alternatively as the unhappy father in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping – either of which would mark him down in the annals of history on their own – but he also made some uncomfortably pro-Hitler statements and very publicly opposed America intervening in World War II. (Though, to his credit, after Pearl Harbour he was willing to join up himself and flew many combat missions as a ‘civilian observer’.)
So there’ll no doubt be an excellent ham role in this as Der Linder, shrieking out bombastic speeches from a telescreen or possibly out the side of a biplane. However, the main focus of the story will be on a working-class Jewish family, played by Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, and Zoe Kazan and tailor-made to illustrate the bad side of a hypothetical Lindbergh empire. Everyone loves an underdog story.
5. Shaun The Sheep: Adventures From Mossy Bottom | March 16
Anyone who looks at Shaun The Sheep and dismisses it as a kids’ show isn’t strictly wrong, but the tragedy there is simply ignorance – ignorance of Aardman Animations, of their history and unimpeachable status in the animation community. They may not have invented the stop-motion style, but nobody’s ever done it quite like them.
The Shaun The Sheep franchise is itself a spinoff of Aardman’s baby Wallace And Gromit, a name which may prompt glints of recognition in a few more peoples’ eyes and itself wholly family-friendly. Both are gentle, low-key affairs which are distinctly Lancastrian in setting and tone. Some might say that it’s ‘despite’ this that both have gone on to receive critical and popular acclaim worldwide, but why put Lancashire down like that? It’s not just Beverly Hills that has an appeal for audiences all over the globe.
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