Esther Smith

Cuckoo, series 4 ep 1, review

There's still life and laughs in this daft family comedy.

Cuckoo season four review

Having killed off its title character three seasons ago, this perky comedy revels in an anything-can-happen perversity.

Review: Cuckoo, BBC Three, series 4, episode 1

All this really needs is a few more laughs.

Episode four of the quirky post-apocalyptic comedy starring Daniel Lawrence Taylor and Esther Smith as Tom and Suze, the hard-done-by survivors of a nuclear war. When their daughter Laura and her peers from the campsite begin to turn a gruesome shade of green, the pair fear the kids have been affected by radiation. Luckily, the smooth-talking doctor (Alexander Armstrong) is on hand to offer a cure for their malady. There is a catch, however, when he asks for an insalubrious favour.

Finally we come to ITV2's new post-apocalyptic sitcom Cockroaches written by Freddy Syborn who wrote alongside Jack Whitehall on Bad Education. Although Whitehall does appear in Cockroaches his is a supporting role as Cuckoo's Esther Smith and Hunderby's Daniel Lawrence Taylor take the lead.

Smith and Taylor play Tom and Suze, school friends who hook up just before a nuclear attack wipes out most of the British population. Ten years later, they find themselves walking an arid wasteland alongside their daughter, and product of their hook-up; Laura. The main body of action takes place when the reluctant couple happen upon a camp run by Suze's ex-boyfriend (Whitehall). There's an obvious jealousy between cool and cocky Oscar and the slightly geeky Tom which is magnified when the former sleeps with Suze. Although she later realises her mistake, the whole situation escalates to a final scene involving a Wicker Man and a severed finger.

Syborn has certainly created a unique sitcom in Cockroaches although not all of his ideas are great. My main bugbear in this first episode was the character of Oscar as it appears that Syborn has let Whitehall play the character as broadly as possible.

Luckily both the leads are likeable and Syborn has created two protagonists that I cared about as the episode progressed.

The laugh-out-loud lines were few and far between but I preferred the quieter moments where Suze and Tom tried to decide whether their relationship was based on love or simply convenience.

Despite not being as impressive a showing as it could've been, Cockroaches definitely showed promise due to its unique premise and likeable leads. By the end of episode one I feel that the sitcom had more than found its feet and I look forward to seeing what will happen to our central couple now that Tom is in charge of a rather haphazard post-apocalyptic community.

There are still ideas that don't really have legs, and still they are finding their way past the green light. Take Cockroaches, a new offering from ITV2. The idea of Freddy Syborn's script is that a nuclear holocaust has wiped out most of humanity, leaving teen couple Tom and Suze (Daniel Lawrence Taylor and Esther Smith) to roam the rural wastelands with their small child, conceived in haste on the night the bomb changed everything.

Essentially, it's the classic Seventies drama Survivors with jokes. That's the theory anyway, but alas the laughs are few and far between. The first few minutes, before disaster strikes, promised much. A newscaster warned of impending Armageddon, adding that no one had bothered to tell Africa and South America. The British Prime Minister (Robert Bathurst, not his first time as a comic PM: see also Hislop and Newman's comedy My Dad's the Prime Minister) was happier answering questions in Latin, a bit like You Know Who.

Spool forward a decade, and the future looked very like the past: jokes about not getting any sex, about in-laws, about cultural reference points (Suze reminisced about a blessed yesteryear in which "we had music, we had literature, we had Ant and Dec"). Suze supplied precious breast milk to both father and daughter, a joke much more creepily explored in Little Britain. The cast enlarged when they encountered a tribe of wood-dwelling dropouts led by Oscar (the ubiquitous Jack Whitehall), a Jafaican-spouting trustafarian ("Who talks like that?" wondered Tom). By the end of the first episode, attempting to enact the climactic immolation from The Wicker Man, he had been defeated. Tom accidentally hacked off his wanking finger.

Almost two years after it began, BBC Three's Cuckoo is back for a second series. Trouble is, the two actors who formed the central romance of the show are gone; U.S comedian Andy Samberg as spaced-out hippy Dale "Cuckoo" Ashbrick, and Tamla Kari as the young British backpacker who fell for his bohemian charms and dragged him back to live with her middle-class parents in middle England.

It wouldn't have surprised me if creators Robin French and Kieron Quirke had decided to let the show die without Samberg and Kari coming back as the unconventional newly-weds, especially as series 1 ended in a satisfying way with few loose ends. Not many people have been crying out for more Cuckoo, let's face it, and Samberg fans can get their fix now he's the lead in U.S hit Brooklyn Nine-Nine over on E4. However, someone at the BBC obviously thought differently, so Cuckoo returns... and, ironically given the titular bird's thieving behaviour, has two new faces in the nest.

Esther Smith (The Midnight Beast) directly replaces Kari as Rachel Thompson, bringing a slightly geekier feel to the character; but rather than recast Cuckoo they've made the peculiar choice to kill him off (a tragic mountaineering accident, with Samberg providing vocals on a sherpa's radio), and bring in his long-lost son Dale. (I guess Cuckoo wasn't very imaginative when naming babies, and--if my maths is correct--must have fathered Dale when he was 14-years-old. Ewww.)

If you can overlook these weird changes, I'm still not sure it was worth bringing Cuckoo back for seconds. Lautner's best-known for showing his pectorals in Twilight movies, so doesn't have the comedy grounding that held Samberg in good stead. Or the same rapport with Greg Davies, as his step-mother's father. Oh yeah, that's another problem: by making Dale a blood relation of Cuckoo, it's all very yucky that Rachel and her mother Lorna (Helen Baxendale) both fancy him. If the show is still intending to be a comedy romance, at heart, this could get very uncomfortable indeed... but perhaps Lautner's character will just become more of an oddball lodger? To be fair to him, Lautner wasn't objectionable in this first episode--he just didn't leap off the screen, playing a slightly quieter character. I just wonder if drawing the Twi-hards is beneficial to Cuckoo, because at least the first series attracted discerning comedy fans aware of Samberg's work on Saturday Night Live, and with comedy group Lonely Island.

We'll have to see if Cuckoo II develops its own identity and memories of Samberg's presence melt away, but I have doubts the chemistry can be replicated. Not that the first series was a diamond, but it could have been polished with a proper return, whereas now it's back to square-one. It doesn't help that laughs were few and far between, either, but maybe future episodes will do better now this awkward transition is over...

Radio Times review

Series two of a sitcom that was billed in 2012 as a transatlantic casting coup, but turned out to be part of a domestic comic's rise to the top. Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg jetted over to play a hippy-ish American who crash-lands into an ordinary Staffordshire family. Having been overshadowed by the man playing the head of the household - Greg Davies - Samberg has been killed off, replaced by Twilight star Taylor Lautner as a second airheaded interloper.

With Esther Smith taking over as Davies's hippy-loving daughter, and a lot of silly setting up to do, this episode feels transitional. But the show's main problem is still there: Davies is funnier than the rest of the cast. And since series one went out, Man Down has shown us that his own scripts are a lot stronger than this.