Matt LeBlanc

Radio Times review

In the final shot of last week's episode, something momentous happened: that grey plastic strip representing Pucks! in the network schedule was tossed in the bin. So the limping British/US sitcom around which this British/US sitcom is built is for the chop: "Even though nobody is willing to put a tag on the toe, this thing is dead," crows Matt LeBlanc to writers Beverly and Sean, even as he scrambles to get a part on another show.

But humiliating Matt has become Episodes' favourite blood sport and there's worse to come, as a young fan forces him to relive his Friends heyday in circumstances only this show would dare dream up.

Pucks! is out of luck. The struggling sitcom has been bumped to Saturday nights, which presents awkward moments for Matt LeBlanc at the network's press party. Elsewhere, sex dominates the agenda of seemingly everyone, with Merc still battling his addiction, and Sean and Bev visiting a sex therapist and becoming all coy, mumbly and British in the process. Still not the barbed Hollywood satire it thinks it is, but Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan have an easy rapport and LeBlanc is clearly having loads of fun portraying his fictional self.

Radio Times review

In theory he's the star of the show, but you sometimes wish we saw more of Matt LeBlanc in Episodes. There's a reason he was one of the highest-paid comic actors in the world: like a tennis pro, he hits the sweet spot of any line or reaction without breaking a sweat.

Here Matt is once again wound up by that bumptious young co-star and starts to feel that his own star is slipping: he's not washed-up, exactly, but neither is he quite the A-lister he once was. Episodes is excellent on these Hollywood status games: a trip to The Tonight Show delivers a dent to the ego (Jay Leno guest-stars as himself). But the best gags revolve around a natural disaster in Peru - and how real-life tragedy plays out in Tinseltown.

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.

Radio Times review

If you're someone who is always rooting for Episodes to live up to its promise, good news: now it roars into gear, after a so far slightly halting start to series three.

To begin with there's a lovely scene where a young actor on Pucks! (the show-within-a-show) goes to Matt LeBlanc for advice. He's getting offers of movie roles and he doesn't know how to choose them. "Back when you were hot, you did a lot of movies, right?" he asks. "I do not wanna be 50 and still doing sitcoms!" The fact that he makes a little gesture to Matt at this point does not endear him to the star of the show, who is now keen to get a movie role himself - at whatever cost to Pucks!

Meanwhile, Sean and Beverly try to discuss the fact that they're having "a problem, fornicationally" and the new network boss calls a 6am meeting and instructs Carol, "Tell people I expect them to bring their truth."

Episodes (BBC Two) is a Transatlantic affair about a husband-and-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who decamp to Los Angeles and adapt their History Boys-esque Brit hit into a dumbed-down US sitcom starring Matt LeBlanc. How very meta. How very postmodern. How very mediocre.

The cartoonish American characters supplied the lion's share of laughs. Ageing playboy LeBlanc sent himself up gamely: vain, self-destructive, increasingly doughy but still silver foxy, with enough flashes of Joey Tribbiani to keep Friends fans happy. Daisy Haggard and Kathleen Rose Perkins were funny as face-pulling, nice-but-dim network executives Myra and Carol, with a tendency to trip over their own high heels in their scramble up the career ladder.

There were some sharp lines. Matt's battle for custody of his children was undermined by his arrest for drunk-driving. "You're the worst client I've ever had," barked his lawyer (our own Nigel Planer, putting on a ropy American accent). "I'd happily trade you for two Mel Gibsons and a Tiger Woods." Carol was infatuated with her square-jawed boss but insisted: "Obviously I would never go there." Beverly (Greig) raised a sceptical eyebrow: "Pur-lease. You keep an apartment there."

Newly reconciled Beverly and Sean (Mangan) were on the rocks again after she admitted having a one-night stand. It's this central pair that are the problem. They convince as writing partners but not as a couple. Mangan, who is normally excellent (see Green Wing, Dirk Gently) comes over like a whiny student. Greig's character is the moral centre of the show but this makes her a bit blank and boring. Their chemistry is strangely sexless. A snogging scene was faintly uncomfortable, of the sort that makes a teenager go, "Ugh, Muuum, Daaad, that's disgusting!" if their parents kiss.

Somehow Episodes has made it to a third series without leaving much of an impression. A fourth has even been commissioned. Presumably it survives owing to the star power of LeBlanc. It makes the odd sharp observation about Hollywood and the fickle nature of celebrity but feels undercooked. It's so busy smugly admiring its own cleverness that it forgot to add enough jokes.

Return to lonely town: Episodes on BBC2

Given the absence of jokes, tension, consequence - and the presence of Matt LeBlanc - what is there to keep the audience of Episodes on its side?

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.

Although perhaps not strictly laugh out loud comedy, this first episode has been well written (the writers are really fantastic) and carefully thought out. Matt LeBlanc is at his best in this fictional version of himself. I mean, that's not hard. It's either Joey in Friends, Joey in Joey or one of Charlie's Angels' boyfriends... that's a very vague memory from a long time ago. IMBDing it to see if I'm right seems almost like cheating now.

Greig and Mangan have been given the straight characters, particularly in comparison to the hilarious, American caricatures that fill their lives, yet they still play them just right. Some of the other characters are slightly over played, which I'm sure is the point, but it does get a little annoying at times. I can forgive this as overall this first episode was so good.

Review: Episodes, Series 3, BBC Two

Any laughs left in the special-relationship com-com with Matt LeBlanc?