Peep Show - Series 8 Page 25

Peep Show, my beloved Peep Show, jumped the shark the moment Mark and Jeremy ate a pet dog. Many won't agree with that but I really believe it. It's almost as if Quantocking is the last absolute golden episode maintaining Peep Show universe and by Quantocking II we're in some horribly deformed alternate reality. (Although the moment Mark gives terminal illness reasoning for the failed conference is perhaps the prelude over-the-top moment to this)

This also coincides with a change in director, Tristram Shapeero to Becky Martin. The latter of which has directed every episode since Quantocking. Together with the false flat set and losing the headcams for "better quality", the heart of Peep Show is alterted. Zany quotable lines over banal Seinfeld-show-about-nothing character driven things has made it a show I care little about. "How thick is wall?", "Depends" to Hans being shot in the rear with a ball bearing? It's some journey this show has taken! But like post Larry David Seinfeld, the show is becoming an out of control cliche-fest of implausible nonsense. Series 8, despite fleeting moments, has been the horrible realisation that series 6 and 7 always threatened to become.
End it with series 9, bring back Tristram Shapeero to direct the final episode with Mark, Jeremy, Hans and Sophie on trial with every character ever in the show appearing in the final episode...

I guess I know what you mean, but to me sit com plots are just there to hold things together and get characters to do stuff: it doesn't really matter to me whether people are doing shark-jumping activities like eating dogs and giving birth, or whether they're working in credit agencies and watching painting shows, so long as there are brilliant comedy performers delivering lines like "tasetless misery sand", I shall happily keep watching.

Quote: gappy @ December 26 2012, 1:19 PM GMT

I guess I know what you mean, but to me sit com plots are just there to hold things together and get characters to do stuff:

View original

I agree, that's a good way of putting it. I'm not a massive Peep Show fan, mind, although I have watched all of them. It sometimes has got too dirty for my tastes (terrible prude, me)- by which I mean that the adult humour seems dark and hard instead of silly and naive at times. I can only take adult stuff when it's more of the naive and silly. I also never much liked any of the characters. I think it's a sitcom that has maybe had its day and this is one series too far, because in the past I have laughed at bits of it but this one has just mildly bored me. But yes, there is still the odd sharp line.

Has Dobbie become a bit less nice than she used to be?

Quote: prism @ December 26 2012, 11:53 AM GMT

Peep Show, my beloved Peep Show, jumped the shark the moment Mark and Jeremy ate a pet dog.

View original

Funny episode, that.

Quote: Pip Bond @ December 26 2012, 7:34 PM GMT

Has Dobbie become a bit less nice than she used to be?

View original

I think so.
I don't really like her at all now. She's pretty horrible to Mark. (Not that any of them are particularly nice to one another.)

Yes, you're right, and that's another aspect of the show I find less pleasing - the ceaseless nastiness of one character to another And if they're not being nasty to each other, they're taking it in turns to give each other oral sex

Quote: zooo @ December 26 2012, 7:40 PM GMT

I think so.
I don't really like her at all now. She's pretty horrible to Mark. (Not that any of them are particularly nice to one another.)

View original

I don't know, I think a combination of a young friend's death and increasingly dealing with Mark's inconsistencies and irate neediness would start to make you tetchy after a while. Her actions this series didn't seem unreasonable to me (although she got fewer funny lines than she has in the past, I'll admit).

I'll admit I find it more satisfying when characters are doing mundane things like not enjoying a dance class to epic things like not getting married, but the beauty of Peep Show is that so long as the interior monologues continue to ring true and pack the inventive gags, I will pretty much forgive any randomness in the plotting.

Great comedy is often, vicious and dark. Peep Show perhaps has moved with the times to be a little more graphic.

But in terms of meanness and cruelty, c'mon Steptoe, Fawlty Towers were full of bitterness and madness.

It's what made them funny. It's Peep Show's darkness and realism that makes it funny.

Quote: Matthew Stott @ December 26 2012, 7:37 PM GMT

Funny episode, that.

View original

Gigantic understatement

I do find myself almost weeping for Mark, because he's me.
That wounded, anal, need to be right even if it means his destruction.
And somebody should have killed Jez by now.

But no one kills a pork pie like Robert Webb.

I like the food theme that runs through the show.

Quote: lofthouse @ December 26 2012, 10:25 PM GMT

Gigantic understatement

View original

Cracking episode full of great moments, "I feel, I don't know, unfulfilled"

"UN-FILLED!?"

"No Jez, if you drunk my piss, I'd feel violated."

"You won't even let ME drink YOUR piss"

But ueah the dog eating, I don't know. It's just always stuck with me as one of the moments that series I became a bit dubious of everything.

I always thought that was one of the best episodes of e

Sitcom indeed one of the most artistically perfect

I enjoyed this run. Not as good as previous series? I guess so, but I can't think of any other comedy that was at its best in its 8th series. Maybe Only Fools and Horses.

I hope series 9 is only one year away instead of two.

I think it was better than most anything on the telly and one of the few shows that takes on the top rank of the US.
But it's disappointing they dumped so much of the progress plotting in earlier seasons. And basing so much of the story around Dobbie kinda killed off a really quirky (and sexy character).

Quote: chipolata @ December 25 2012, 11:53 AM GMT

snip...

Not that one.

View original

It was that one. I.e. the first "Oh, for fff.." when he met the date at the pub.

He also did the same thing when he met the girlfriend/wife of one of the workers when he was waiting for his date at the office party ("I was waiting for a blind date and was worried you were it"), which is probably the one you thought he had meant.