David Crane (I)

Radio Times review

Sean and Beverly's terrible Pucks!, which stars Matt LeBlanc's ghastly alter-ego, has risen from the dead - "like Jesus if Jesus was a s****y sitcom" says one character. Some people might think Episodes itself should have been put out of its misery a while back. But Friends stalwart and co-writer David Crane has managed to breathe more life into a comedy that is as much a wry look at transatlantic foibles as Crane's satire/revenge on the industry he (and co-scribe and real-life partner Jeffrey Klarik) know all too well.

Some of the lines feel a little ponderous in places but many are brilliant. And the chemistry between Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig's exasperated Brits and LeBlanc's desperately shallow but oddly likeable leading man keep this singing.

TV preview, Episodes, BBC2

If the fictional Pucks! script is dodgy, the Episodes script by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik is well up to scratch, littered with screwball banter and anti-PC jokes.

Three episodes in and the third series of Episodes has settled in comfortably. Which is rather the problem. The main charm of Episodes was always its awkwardness.

Initially, Sean and Bev were the outsiders bringing their English reserve and idiom to the sledgehammer of the Hollywood TV industry; now, though, their accents apart, they are both native LA. They've long since ceased to care about the show they are writing and are jaundiced insiders in the dream-factory, churning out second-rate scripts in exchange for first-rate money. In short, a key part of the sit has gone out of the sitcom: Episodes has become exactly the type of show it used to have a pop at.

It is, at least, still a com. Tamsin Greig, Stephen Mangan and Matt LeBlanc are all wonderfully good actors with near-perfect comic timing, so there are still plenty of laughs to be had. Just not as many as there used to be. It's become routine. The scripts feel a bit saggier, though it's possible that's part of a meta gag in which writers David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik are mimicking the trajectory of Sean and Bev's own writing. If so, it's a dangerous game.

The key faultline is that Episodes has written itself into a cul-de-sac. There's nothing left to it apart from a series of relationships and most of the interesting things that can happen have already happened. Sean and Bev have split up, slept with other people and are now back together-ish, while Matt is just Matt. There's some fun to be had in the ongoing "Will Sean, Won't Sean, ever get a stiffy again?" saga, but you feel that Greig and Mangan are working overtime trying to make it funny. They know each other so well that they can finish each other's sentences and gags; more worryingly, so can I. I'm not even sure I'm that bothered whether Sean does get a stiffy or not any more.

Towards the end of this episode, Bev told Carol that she and Sean wanted to get Pucks! canned so they could go back to England. I couldn't help agreeing. Except we know that's almost certainly not going to happen as the BBC has already commissioned a fourth series. Like Sean and Bev, Episodes has become a victim of its own success.

Episodes shouldn't, perhaps, work. The tale of a husband-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who are persuaded, with a refreshing lack of reluctance, to sell out and take their fictionally Bafta-winning (and very British) comedy to Hollywood, thence to have it "made over" with gleeful disregard for such restrictive critical concerns as, for instance, taste - is surely too close to the experiences of many homegrown authors and film-makers for the memories to be anything other than vile at best. The Greig/Mangan original comedy, for instance, fictionally starred Richard Griffiths as a tweedy teacher in his twilight: transposed, the writers are both starstruck and horrified to find the grinsome Matt LeBlanc, Joey from Friends, in his place.

But it does work - and how. Partly through the subtlety of the writing, by Jeffrey Klarik and his partner David Crane, also of Friends fame: Friends, of course, wasn't written with British audiences in mind, but might as well have been, and its appreciation of "our" sense of humour (and our preconceptions about how the Americans could never quite "do" it) meant it became a crossover dream. As Episodes is now proving: it's been garnering much critical praise over there. Partly, too, thanks to the chemistry between Greig, Mangan and Matt LeBlanc, who's playing a lightly fictionalised version of "Matt LeBlanc" - kindly, vainglorious, deeply shallow to the extent that he has drunkenly invited his crazed stalker into his bed.

And one of the simple delights lies in seeing how far Tamsin Greig has come, from stoic work as Debbie Aldridge in The Archers, to a revelatory gift for comedy as Fran in the sublime Black Books, to - ta-dah! - sunny La-La-Land: Toto, we're not in Ambridge any more. This is just telly that makes you smile. Incidentally, one of the gags involves Matt, arrested on a borderline DUI charge, to be met with a beaming desk-sergeant who proudly boasts that his sister was nurse No 4 or something in one Friends episode. Matt does his winning best to pretend to remember her. (He's still booked.) On Good Morning Britain the other day, Matt popped up, only to have Ben Shephard remind him that he, Ben, had once "played" an interviewer in one Friends episode. Matt did his winning best to pretend to remember him. A trouper.

Dragons! Goblins! Lizard men! Ogres! Harpies! Mermen! Succubi! Just some of the suggestions tossed desperately around a TV network brainstorming session when LA studio boss Merc casts around for ideas. It's a lovely scene that, like so much of the Hollywood material in Episodes, has just enough plausibility, not least because you can imagine that the show's writers - including David Crane of Friends - have been around the studio block enough times to have seen this sort of scattershot creativity with their own eyes.

Meanwhile, on the romantic side of the comedy, our separated writers try to cope with the fact that one of them is now dating, allowing Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan to squirm with awkwardness as only they know how.

I feel pathetic for thinking how nice it is that Matt LeBlanc has deigned to star in the British sitcom Episodes (BBC Two, Friday). I suppose he's not exactly slumming it, giving that it is a big-budget, joint British and American production, written by David Crane, the co-creator of Friends. And the first series won LeBlanc a Golden Globe. But still.

LeBlanc plays an insensitive, sexually rampant, self-absorbed version of himself, who comes between a British husband and wife (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) by sleeping with the wife. It's play-within-a-play stuff, or rather sitcom-within-a-sitcom, a bit like Extras. It also represents something of a mini-genre in which stars play versions of themselves, such as Larry David in the glorious Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The first episode of this second series of Episodes got off to a slightly wobbly start with a gratuitous scene in which LeBlanc was given hand relief by a blind woman in a screening room. Sub-American Pie that, I thought. But it had its moments. I even laughed out loud at one point when LeBlanc began smiling during a telling off from his former mate Mangan. "I miss this," he said... Perhaps you had to be there. My favourite line though was this from a TV executive: "No one cares about TV reviews. They hate most of the crap we've got on the air and people still watch it."

Hopes were high for the first series of Episodes. Combining a writer and a star from Friends (David Crane and Matt LeBlanc) with Britain's finest (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) for a comedy about a writing duo whose sitcom is remade in Hollywood seemed like bankable comedy gold. Then the first episode aired and it wasn't even comedy silver or comedy bronze, more comedy pig-iron - a wobbly, ill-paced clunker.

But if you gave up, you gave up too soon. Halfway through, the series flipped. As it became less about fish-out-of-water jokes and more about sex, drugs, love triangles and car crashes, it came good. It became the clever, filthy, self-lacerating show we'd hoped for, even if the ratings didn't soar.

Thankfully, it's back. Four months after Matt (LeBlanc) so disastrously slept with Beverly (Greig), Pucks! (the show-within-the-show) is about to get its network premiere, but for its writers, all is not well.

Radio Times review

The 39th best TV show of 2011 according to the Radio Times.

Has a sitcom ever started so badly and finished so well? Hopes were sky-high for BBC2's Hollywood-set comedy that united the talents of a Friends star (Matt LeBlanc), a Friends writer (David Crane) and two gloriously on-form British actors (Tamsin Grieg and Stephen Mangan), so the actual show was bound to disappoint. Which it did, with a wince-making mess of a first episode and several ho-hum ones to follow. Then, something magical happened: by the end of its short run it found its feet and built to a brilliant finale - which, given that the plot was about sitcom writers finding their feet, was strangely apt.

Can LeBlanc win an Emmy playing LeBlanc on 'Episodes'?

Matt LeBlanc admits to Gold Derby he resisted the idea of "Friends" co-creator David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik to spoof his image on the Showtime series Episodes.

The latest sitcom from Friends co-creator David Crane stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig as a British couple who write a hit BBC TV show. They move to LA to recreate their sitcom for a US audience, but realise the studio execs have no intention of sticking to their original concept. Enter the great Matt LeBlanc (Friends' Joey), playing a caricature of himself, who is horribly miscast as the show's protagonist, much to Mangan and Greig's vexation. Frequent laugh-out-loud moments and a host of endearingly awful characters make this series feel like a very promising start, but Americanised one-liners fail to capitalise on Mangan and Greig's distinctly British delivery.