Stephen Mangan

Stephen Mangan is Ed, leading a new life as a bike repair man in a village. And then we discover why in Marcy Kahan's smart, sharp, witty play. Twenty minutes in one day changed his old life utterly. He spotted a national treasure in the street, Pen Rhinehart (barrister, author, erstwhile circus clown) and called out to him. Pen was on a bike. Ed's cry made him wobble and fall under a lorry. No one saw. Ed ran away. Ren was taken to hospital by others. He's not dead. But Ed is being pursued by wildly assorted demons.

Episodes (Monday, BBC Two), a new Anglo-American sitcom, has a clever credit sequence in which a script takes off like a bird, flies across the Atlantic to LA, where it's blasted out of the air and plummets to earth. Unfortunately, this encapsulated the plot rather more succinctly than anything that followed.

Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a husband-and-wife writing team whose latest comedy is bought by an American network.

They're flown out to California and made a big fuss of, but everything soon turns predictably sour. The writers want the star of the British version - an unusually subdued Richard Griffiths - to star in the American one, and are horrified when the role is given to Matt LeBlanc. I know this sounds a bit picky, but as every British comedy that's ever been bought by Hollywood has been recast, it was hard to see what they were so steamed up about.

It also seemed odd, given that one of the perennial American complaints about British sitcoms is they're too slow, that this should have so many longueurs. OK, the show only lasted half an hour, so they weren't actually that long. But sometimes, to quote the ancient Chinese proverb, even a short longueur is quite long enough.

There weren't many duff notes in Friends, the slick NBC sitcom that ran and ran from 1994 to 2004 and, for those of us with homes full of teenagers, is still running and running. But one of its duffest notes was the casting of Helen Baxendale to play Ross's British wife, Emily. Nothing against Baxendale, but amid all that sassy American humour, she seemed as flaccidly English as a stale Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

In fairness, that was kind of the point; we weren't meant to warm to Emily. And Baxendale, deliberately, didn't get many killer lines. But it wasn't just that; whip-smart, wisecracking American humour just doesn't sound right emerging from a British mouth. For the same reason, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves) was my least favourite character in the otherwise sublime Frasier. It's not that British actors aren't capable of wonderful TV comedy, just that the dialogue in the best US sitcoms is rooted in New York-Jewish traditions of razor-sharp put-downs and one-liners. Think Woody Allen and Neil Simon. On British television, comic dialogue has a different rhythm.

Anyway, all of this brings me to Episodes, in which Matt LeBlanc (dim, amiable Joey in Friends) plays a heightened version of himself in the latest example of what is rapidly becoming a TV genre all of its own: celebrities indulging in a game of double-bluff with us, playing themselves as slightly more neurotic and prima donna-ish than they actually are, which of course suggests that they're not neurotic prima donnas at all. Steve Coogan did this beautifully in The Trip recently, as did Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Episodes, it is LeBlanc's turn. He plays Matt LeBlanc, hugely rich and successful thanks to Friends, who to the horror of married British comedy writers Beverly and Sean (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) is cast as the lead in the US version of their hit UK show. They wanted their British lead, a fruity RSC type called Julian (Richard Griffiths). But they get LeBlanc.

So far, so good. It's a great idea, with great opening credits: a script flying from London to LA. And there are certainly precedents for television successfully turning a mirror on itself; The Larry Sanders Show of blessed memory did it exquisitely. Moreover, there's something painfully real about British comedy writers being lured to LA by the sweet blandishments of network bosses and the promise of a Spanish-style hacienda in Beverly Hills, only for the semi-detached back in Chiswick to seem even more alluring once the dream starts to sour. You should hear the British writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who did the whole hacienda thing, on the subject. Yet I find myself unable to give a fat thumbs-up after the opening Episodes, and the problem lies with Greig and Mangan, or at least with their script. In a British context, they're both terrific comic performers. Greig was pitch-perfect as the hapless heroine in David Renwick's wonderful Love Soup. But here, trading waspish one-liners in the land of Jack Benny and George Burns, they seemed out of place. And although that's the whole point - that they are out of place - they should at least be talking like Brits, not Americans.

Still, it's early days. I have a feeling that Episodes will get better the more LeBlanc gets involved. And there have already been some lovely gags, like the friskiness that gripped Beverly and Sean when they saw that the vast bath in their rented Beverly Hills home could easily accommodate both of them, only for it to wear off while they waited for the damn thing to fill.

Episodes episode 1 review: series premiere

Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig star in the new comedy series Episodes. Here's Ryan's review of its debut show...

Americans just don't get our comedy. Our irony, our laugh-at-ourselves self-deprecation, our way with a juicy double entendre. At least that's the slightly lazy premise at the bitterly amusing heart of Episodes (BBC2), which finds a pair of Bafta-winning British writers heading to Hollywood to create a US version of their pet project, only to have it hijacked by those insensitive Yanks.

If you can get over that self-satisfied bump - from Till Death Us Do Part to The Office, the Americans actually have a respectable record of translating our laughs to their market - Episodes is actually a sharp and slick take on how we British revel in our own inferiority complex.

As the married writing duo, played with neat mix-and-match timing by Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig, get swept off their feet by the American Dream, their cynical posturing looks like so much hot air. They want it - the fame, the money - and they want it bad. Only it would be gauche to say so.

You could tell this was a British series because the set-up - having Matt LeBlanc foisted on them as leading man when the part was written for Richard Griffiths in History Boys mode - took an entire episode. The Americans would have done it in ten minutes.

The US comedy convention of starting a new series with a double-bill would have been one well worth copying after endless trails teasing us with the presence of LeBlanc, complete with distinguished gent salt-and-pepper hair. He only popped up briefly at the beginning and in the trailer for episode two. It left you feeling a tad twisted and manipulated - rather like the writers we were supposed to feel sorry for.

Green Wing fans will be overjoyed to see Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig back on screen together. In this new series they are scriptwriting husband and wife Beverly and Sean Lincoln who get an irresistible offer to transfer their hit British series - Lyman's Boys - to the US.

The scene set in their new producer's office in Hollywood is a brilliantly crafted exchange of double-talk and flim-flam and you can bet it's based on bitter experience, tales of woe and the frustrations of talented Brits who've had to deal with knuckle-headed American TV bosses. The star of Lincoln's show - set in a boys' school - is venerable British actor Julian Bullard played by the stout and silver-haired Richard Griffiths. By next week, he'll have been recast as his polar opposite.

This first episode is enjoyable if not quite as laden with zingers like Glee. But if it's a hit, it makes you wonder how the US version of Episodes might turn out.

An Anglo-American coproduction between stalwart British comedy outlet Hat Trick and acclaimed US writers David Crane (co-creator of Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), Episodes is something of a curate's egg.

The inherent problems of transposing British comedy to an American setting are directly confronted within the premise of the series itself: terribly postmodern.

Former Green Wing co-stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play successful married screenwriters whose award-winning sitcom is picked up by a powerful American network.

Whisked over to LA, they're shocked to discover that their quintessentially British series starring Richard Griffiths (who cameos as a version of himself) as an "erudite, verbally dextrous headmaster of an elite boy's academy" has been recast as a vehicle for wholly unsuitable Friends/Joey star Matt LeBlanc (also playing himself, inevitably as an egotistical buffoon).

Evidently aware of the ignoble tradition of point-missing American adaptations of great British comedies (Fawlty Towers without Basil? Why not!), Crane and Klarik have devised a sporadically amusing if rather obvious satire encompassing all the usual targets and stereotypes.

The Brits-out-of-water are cute and witty, the Americans shallow and crass. TV executives are liars.

Actors are self-absorbed. And despite protestations to the contrary, Hollywood just doesn't "get" British humour: the clever irony being that Episodes is written by a pair of witty American Anglophiles cocking a snook at the culture that made them millionaires.

The hollowness of the entertainment industry has been satirised so often, the curiously muted Episodes doesn't offer anything new. It feels like a missed opportunity, despite the odd bright spot and the natural chemistry between Mangan and the underrated Greig.

This rather tasty new cynical-outsiders-in-LA sitcom is a very transatlantic affair; it's from British powerhouse company Hat Trick (Father Ted, Outnumbered) and Friends producer David Crane.

Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig are an English husband-and-wife writing team who cautiously move to Tinseltown to remake their hit TV show, while Matt LeBlanc plays the star they must cast who is primed to wreak havoc on their careers and marriage.

Stephen Mangan interview

Actor Stephen Mangan, 38, is best known for his role in comedy show Green Wing. He's also appeared in comedy series Free Agents and in British comedy films Beyond The Pole and Confetti. He currently stars in new sitcom Episodes.

Video: High expectations for new BBC show

New BBC Two series Episodes is being tipped as the most anticipated comedy of the year.

Friends creator David Crane is behind the show and it features Matt LeBlanc from Friends in his TV comeback, playing a version of himself.

Green Wing stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play British TV producers who take their hit UK show to the States to remake it.

But for Mangan and Greig things go wrong from the start when they arrive in LA.