Sharon Horgan

Radio Times review

Sharon Horgan's BBC3 comeback - the axing of Pulling still grates with fans - has her behind bars as Helen, a fretting loser wrongly convicted of murder. Can she win freedom? Or is she (and are the viewers) in for a cold, frustrating stretch at a jail full of cartoon inmates and mad staff?

A lot of sitcoms fall back on everyone except the main character being a bumbling loon, which often feels like a way to con us out of the 3D creations that are hard to write but keep us coming back. Of course it's possible to do comedy that doesn't have any truth or soul if the jokes are outlandishly good but, despite a superb cast, Dead Boss struggles to reinvent incompetent lawyers and creepy screws.

Who really killed Helen's boss? The ongoing story arc is too silly to be believable, but not silly enough for that to stop mattering.

Sharon Horgan: 'I've never done anything as stupid'

Sharon Horgan is what you might call a late developer. She spent much of her twenties in dead-end pursuits, training at not-very-good acting schools and taking jobs waitressing and in call centres, before she sobered up and did an English degree at 27.

Dead Boss, BBC3 - review

Sharon Horgan seems to have randomly plucked her new sitcom out of the air, says Jack Seale.

Dead Boss: The best new comedy on TV

Sharon Horgan shines as usual but this is an ensemble piece and everyone gives an equally strong and memorable performance.

Dead Boss is a dead brilliant new sitcom

It apparently took Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh several years to bring Dead Boss to screen and it seems it was certainly worth the wait as all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode. But the fun didn't stop there... oh no...

A strong cast doesn't conceal the fact that, on the evidence of the opening two episodes, this new comedy scripted by Holly Walsh and the usually reliable Sharon Horgan (above) needs to be funnier and darker. Horgan plays Helen, wrongly sent to prison for killing her boss. Nobody on the outside, including her hopeless lawyer (Geoff McGivern), seems able to help, while inside she has to contend with the malevolent governor (Jennifer Saunders). Future episodes promise star appearances by Caroline Quentin and Miranda Richardson.

Sharon Horgan co-writes (with Holly Walsh) and stars in a new comedy about a woman wrongly imprisoned for her boss's murder. It also stars Jennifer Saunders as the prison governor and Geoff McGivern as her shady solicitor. The first of two episodes tonight sees Helen (Horgan) sent down for 12 years after the boss of the tile warehouse she works at is found dead. In the second, she enters the prison quiz, in an attempt to shave five years off her sentence.

Sharon Horgan interview

Thursday sees the return of Sharon Horgan to BBC3. Fans of laugh-out-loud comedies will remember Horgan's last BBC3 comedy Pulling with great fondness, and now she is back with a brand new six-part comedy co-written with stand-up Holly Walsh, entitled Dead Boss.

Holly Walsh interview

Holly Walsh talks about her new sitcom starring Jennifer Saunders, Sharon Horgan's amazing garden shed and how she turned a nasty accident to her advantage.

The disappointment of the week had to be Dead Boss, BBC3's six-part comedy thriller with murder-mystery overtones starring Sharon Horgan, who co-wrote the show with Holly Walsh.

Horgan plays Helen, wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment within the forbidding walls of Broadmarsh Prison. And broad is the operative word here. The producers have clearly gone for big laughs - a laudable ambition - but the route they've taken is obvious and predictable. The quality of the jokes is erratic, to say the least, while the talented cast wastes its energies on stale stereotypes.

Horgan, the most deliciously subtle of performers, is left frantically mugging away for laughs, which is something of a crime in itself.