Chris O'Dowd

Family Tree - TV review

Chris O'Dowd is very watchable in this BBC Two comedy, but there are no surprises here, or lols - or any sort of laughs

When it comes to top pedigree, Family Tree (BBC Two) is hanging off some high branches. Boasting Chris O'Dowd, a big (well, at least medium) Hollywood cheese these days, as the central character and Christopher (Best In Show) Guest on writing and creating duties, you might expect this to be a big deal movie release. Instead, it's an oddly understated sitcom.

O'Dowd is a fresh and engaging comic talent. He breathes believable life into Tom Chadwick, one of life's drifters, whose aimless existence takes a surprising turn when he's left a chest containing random bits and bobs by a long-forgotten great aunt. Among the bobs is an old photo of a military gent, which sets our Tom off on a Who Do You Think You Are?-style jaunt.

The trouble is, everyone else in Tom's life is mildly bonkers, from his ventriloquist sis to the crackpot in the corner shop. Tom Bennett is a notable exception, good value as best mate Pete, but he has to fight his way through the gaggle of eccentrics choking Family Tree at the roots. And that confessional speaking-to-camera trick? All too wearily familiar.

Family Tree is an odd kind of affair. It's been created by comedy aristocracy (it's co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, who created This Is Spinal Tap), but it came across in this first episode as amateurishly awkward, funny in a desultory kind of way at one moment, startlingly clunky at others.

Chris O'Dowd stars as Tom, an out-of-work risk assessor triggered to research his ancestral past by a bequest from a great-aunt, and Nina Conti plays his sister Bea, complete with the monkey vent doll, explained here as the result of childhood therapy for elective mutism ("she hadn't skoken in weeks," the monkey helpfully explains). The dialogue has the loose, bantering style of improvisation - which gives it a warmth and realism to counterbalance the slightly effortful zaniness - and the style (in a half-hearted way) is mock-documentary.

The format doesn't make much sense. Why would anyone be making a film about Tom and his family, particularly since the mission to explore the past hasn't even occurred to him at the beginning of the episode? Besides, there doesn't seem to be any real tension between the actuality sequences and the more formal talking-head interviews that occasionally pop up (in the style of Modern Family).

But it is Christopher Guest. Some of the character comedy, promisingly, is funny, in particular a sequence in which Tom went on a blind date with a very stupid girl ("There's been loads of sightings of dinosaurs in Africa," she assured him when he expressed polite doubt about their continued existence). Watch, in the hope of developments.

Watching this new Christopher Guest sitcom is a peculiar experience. For example, the pieces to camera can look like a hackneyed device, worn out through over-use. But then, if Christopher Guest can't utilise pieces to camera from his characters, who can? For a particular kind of arch, absurd, self-aware comedy, he wrote the rulebook.

This feels like a very new venture for Guest. Not only is Family Tree his first TV project, but it's more plot-heavy and open-ended than his film work: the box of family treasures given to laconic lost soul Tom Chadwick (Chris O'Dowd) could be the passport to as much digression, misadventure and silliness as Guest and the cast fancy, as Tom follows his familial trail through Britain and America.

The Family Tree ensemble also contains Michael McKean, Nina Conti, co-writer Jim Piddock, Tom Bennett and eventually, such mainstays of Guest's films as Fred Willard. So, even if this opening episode feels slightly low-key, it seems reasonable to assume that we're in safe comedic hands.

Radio Times review

If you like the kind of amiable comedy that doesn't hammer every joke home, this could be for you. It's co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, who helped popularise mock-documentaries (This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind) and stars the excellent Chris O'Dowd as Tom, an unemployed 30-something who sets about tracing his family history.

Future episodes take Tom to America (HBO co-produces the series) but for now the action meanders around London, where Tom receives a case of family memorabilia from a great aunt and starts wondering about his ancestors. Was one a field marshall?

The plot is silly but in a confident sort of way: what other comedy would feature a character (Tom's sister) who expresses her deeper feelings via a ventriloquist's dummy of a monkey?

Chris O'Dowd brings his engaging brand of humour to the role of Tom Chadwick in this mockumentary from Christopher Guest (Best In Show, This Is Spinal Tap). When we join Chadwick, he's adjusting well to a life of 'wallowing' after being dumped by his girlfriend and redundancy from work. Then things perk up, after the sad demise of a great-aunt who leaves 'a little something' for him. Not, as it happens, a cash windfall but a tatty old chest stuffed with family knick-knacks that lead him on an ancestral adventure. With support from Nina Conti as Tom's sister, Bea, who lets out her inner voice through her ventriloquist puppet, Monkey.

This gently off-the-wall mockumentary marks the return, after a seven-year break, of Christopher Guest, the writer-actor-director responsible for [o]Best In Show[/i], A Mighty Wind and, of course, This Is Spinal Tap. This latest one features Bridesmaids and The IT Crowd star Chris O'Dowd, who plays a man tracing his family history. Mike McKean and Nina Conti (and Monkey) are his dad and sister; the latter was once sent to a therapist after a puffin touched itself inappropriately while looking directly at her. Glorious.

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