Stephen Mangan

Before and after the show: Stephen Mangan

'If the crowd's hushed and reverent I know I'll have to work harder': Stephen Mangan reveals his pre- and post-gig rituals.

Three seasons in, Brit writers Bev (Tamsin Greig) and Sean (Stephen Mangan) are still trying to acclimatise to the bewildering world of Hollywood, and Matt LeBlanc is still bumbling around like a bear with a bees' nest on his head. But Episodes does feel like a sharper, snappier creature this time around, less interested in the internecine workings of the showbiz industry and more in the venal, shallow bubble around Los Angeles - new-age therapy, partner-swapping et al.

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.

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 review

It's a banal relationship comedy, with no special ingredient at all. Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig are a geeky, immature couple, trying to write a hit show but out of their depth among the U.S. has-beens and permatanned executives. It might as well be called Californian Luvvies.

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.

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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.

Q&A: Stephen Mangan

Stephen Mangan, 41, was born in London. He studied law at Cambridge, then went to Rada.

Matt LeBlanc, Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan interview

"A fair bit of it is exaggerated so that we can all still go and get a job afterwards," says Matt LeBlanc.