Sharon Horgan

It's a good time for female-led comedy

Sharon Horgan and Julia Davis are among those with new series coming to screen - but why are women still so badly represented on shows such as Mock the Week?

Dead Boss creators 'begged' Jennifer Saunders for role

Dead Boss creators Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh have admitted that they became "obsessed" with Jennifer Saunders after she agreed to appear in their new BBC Three comedy.

It's always a pleasure to see new work from Sharon Horgan. And, while this sitcom is no Pulling (which we may never forgive BBC3 for canning), Dead Boss contains plenty of Horgan's customarily waspish wit. Helen Stephens (Horgan) has been sent to prison for the murder of her boss - a crime she didn't commit. However, everything - from her selfish sister to her inept lawyer - seems to be conspiring to keep her behind bars. In certain hands, this scenario might be vaguely Kafka-esque; in Horgan's, it's gleefully silly as Helen reluctantly bonds with her needy, arsonist cellmate, gets assaulted with pumice stone after offending 'Mrs Big' and is sleazed over by the (male) screws. Not essential yet, but pretty good fun all the same.

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.

'Dead Boss' like 'Mean Girls', say writers

Dead Boss writers Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh have claimed that their new BBC Three show is more like Mean Girls than a "social commentary" on life in jail.

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.