Stephen Mangan

Matt LeBlanc curbs his enthusiasm, playing himself alongside Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig in this comedy about two British TV writers whose award-winning show about a charming, erudite English headmaster is picked up for a US remake by a boorish US producer who immediately inserts LeBlanc into the lead role. It lacks big laughs, but has a similar charm to another Mangan vehicle, Free Agents.

LeBlanc's 'brave' move on to British TV

Friends' star Matt LeBlanc's TV comeback is a "brave choice" according to his Episodes co-star Stephen Mangan.

You really have to admire BBC2 for being so single-minded and indeed innovative in its quest for comedies without laughs. After Roger and Val Have Just Got In and The Trip comes Episodes, a cautionary tale of English scriptwriters who uproot and move to Hollywood. Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan are excellent as creators of the award-winning comedy series Lyman's Boys, who fall for the blandishments of a US TV executive and agree to re-create their successful show in the States. But on their arrival in LA things go wrong as they are subjected to fake smiles and doublespeak as the network corrupts their beloved creation. Episodes has everything going for it, including scripts co-written by Friends' David Crane, yet it never catches light. Situations are laboured and - where's the wit?

If a British sitcom gets better-than-average ratings, wins a couple of awards and isn't too downright weird to get lost in translation, it's not unusual for an American TV network to approach its creators with a mind to a Stateside remake. Probably the best known example of this is the American version of The Office, now in its seventh season, but the practice has been going on since at least the 1970s, when Steptoe and Son, rather surreally, was remade in Los Angeles as Sanford and Son.

What's little discussed, though, is how a behind-the-scenes collaboration between cynical British writers and hard-nosed US executives plays out - which is where this new sitcom, written by David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), comes in.

It stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig as a British husband-and-wife team who produce a successful show called Lyman's Boys, which is duly scooped up by a US network. They jet out to California and start working with their new colleagues, all of whom seem intent on stamping out any hint of fusty Britishness, starting with the show's corpulent lead, Julian (Richard Griffiths), whom they decide to replace with the wonderfully unsuitable Matt LeBlanc (Joey from Friends). The first episode is high on plot development and low on gags, but the series does improve and is worth sticking with.

Video: Tamsin Greig interview

Tamsin Greig stars in a new BBC2 comedy 'Episodes' with Matt LeBlanc.

The sitcom looks at the pitfalls of trying to adapt a UK comedy to suit American tastes. It follows two British writers who are sent to LA to remake their award winning comedy.

Soon their school room setting is swapped for an ice hockey locker room and their lead actor has been replaced by the Friends star, Matt LeBlanc.

Tamsin Greig plays Beverley alongside Stephen Mangan as Sean. She told BBC Breakfast what it was like to work with Matt LeBlanc.

Episodes: BBC Explores Differences between UK & USA TV

Matt LeBlanc plays himself in Episodes, a new BBC Two comedy drama due to start on Monday 10 January 2011 and also starring Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig.

Episodes cast interview

An interview with Matt LeBlanc, Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig.

Episodes, which got uproarious laughter in cut-down form at the Television Critics Association press tour in July, does not disappoint an ounce as it rolls through a seven-episode season. It also signals a savvy return to television for LeBlanc, who manages to be the butt of the joke one moment then hilariously likable the next. It takes confidence to play yourself but not really yourself and to know that moving past Joey and Friends means a simultaneous embracing/mocking of the legacy.

The premise of Episodes is simple (and all too real). Over-the-top, hug-happy, faux-sincere network president Merc Lapidus (John Pankow) meets the happily married writing team of Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) right as they've snared a slew of BAFTA Awards for their (fictional) hit series, Lyman's Boys.

Lapidus loves the series and wants it on his network. He tries to woo the duo to the States, saying the show's perfect as is and would require a mere 20 minutes of their magic to make it Americanized. They can spend the rest of their time counting the money and screwing in the pool.

So they make the leap. And, not surprisingly, it's a long drop. Lapidus wants the British star of the series that has run for four seasons to audition - despite Sean and Beverly having told him he had the job.

Turns out, Lapidus doesn't watch much TV. "There's a chance that Merc might not have actually seen your show," says Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins), second-in-command to Lapidus. "What?!" Sean and Beverly say in tandem. "I'm not saying he hasn't seen it," Carol says. "Has he seen it?" Beverly asks. "No," Carol says, shaking her head sadly.

And so it goes. Episodes was created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, the writing duo that knows more than a little something about how the industry works. (Crane wrote for Friends, and Klarik wrote for Mad About You; both wrote for The Class.) There's so much delicious fun-house-mirror truth here. When the British thespian (played with gravitas by Richard Griffiths) does the audition, Lapidus and everybody else howls with laughter. They ask him to step outside for a moment, and Lapidus says, "Is it me or does anyone else think he comes off a bit too English?" They then make him read it again with an American accent. Nobody laughs.

Episodes might be inside baseball to some, but viewers are savvy enough about real-life industry types to get the joke. (God help them if they really were to see how shows evolve.) One of the sly bits in the series is Myra (Daisy Haggard), the head of comedy development, who has the same sour smile and confused look at all times - a visual joke that never fails.

Mangan and Greig are exceptionally good as the fish-out-of-water Brits, horrified that their show is getting rejiggered. Mangan's Sean is seduced by Hollywood, and Greig's Beverly is repulsed and appalled at the cluelessness. When the network hires LeBlanc to play the lead, Episodes takes off to all kinds of unexpected places - with LeBlanc getting a glorious showcase - and the show avoids any potential trouble spots.

In fairness, not every network would take a British series called Lyman's Boys, about a headmaster at an elite boys boarding school, and change it to Pucks! about a hockey coach at said school. But then again, one or two would. And that's all the truth Episodes needs to tap into.

Navel-gazing comedy series starring Matt LeBlanc as himself, about a British sitcom-writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) and the humiliations they endure when the show is remade for American television. Written by David Crane (Friends) and co-produced with Showtime in America, it sounds like a recipe for disaster but is actually very funny.

I like comedies, I like dramas. Comedy-dramas I've never been sure about and Dirk Gently has all but convinced me they don't work. The eponymous hero is a detective who believes in "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" but after this outing, even he'd struggle to make a case for that hyphen straddling the two genres.

Gently is the creation of Douglas Adams who was working on another of his cases when he died. This one began with a missing cat and ended with what seemed like the attempted murder of the three attractive leads, Stephen Mangan as Gently, Helen Baxendale and Darren Boyd, who was in the recent Whites with Alan Davies and seems to be cornering the market in sidekicks to curly-headed fools. They all survived but surely the show won't.

The soundtrack twanged with Randall & Hopkirk-esque harpsichord (or did that pair use a spinet?).

The hero chugged around in a Leyland Princess. But Dirk Gently lacked drama, despite blowing all of BBC4's special-effects budget for 2011 on a warehouse explosion, and it lacked comedy with not one halfway funny line - this only making me yearn for the return of Mangan's cFree Agents from last year and scour Amazon for a cheap box-set of Baxendale's Cardiac Arrest, deadly certain laughs of the darkest hue.