Stephen Mangan

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.

There was something satisfyingly leisurely about Dirk Gently, adapted from a Douglas Adams novel about an old lady's missing cat, and starring Stephen Mangan as the one-man "holistic detective agency" hired to find it. It wasn't the smoothest of narratives. I could never wholly applaud a plot that so late in the day relied on hypnosis and time travel (the only sci-fi trace element from the original story). And, although there was laughter and invention, I'm not sure that bumping into a closed door aspires to the heights of modern comedy, even when accompanied by the ditsy loose-limbed rhythms of 1950s jazz. But it had a pleasing, meandering pace to it. You had to admire the way that Dirk's investigative method - based on "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" - made an unlikely virtue of stringing together unlikely coincidences. And Mangan did a fine job as the eponymous oddball loafer-genius, with his boffiny corkscrew hair, love of biscuits and the rapid eye movements of a man accustomed to making a quick buck and a quicker exit; Darren Boyd was good, too, as the bewildered but biddable sidekick Macduff. As the girlfriend, Helen Baxendale was as nice as ever. It wasn't Sherlock, but I wouldn't mind seeing what a series could do.

There's a lot missing from Dirk Gently (BBC4). I don't mean the missing cat that scatty and unconventional detective Dirk has been employed to find, or Gordon Way, the billionaire who disappeared at exactly the same time (though time is complicated around here). I'm talking about things in Douglas Adams's novel, vast swaths of it, in fact, that have gone missing in its transformation to the screen. Adams freaks (I think the f-word is justified here) will, no doubt, be cross.

Truth is, though, it would be physically impossible to cram all that wild imagination into 60 minutes of television. If it sounds as if I've read the book and know what the hell I'm talking about, then that's lovely, but misleading; I haven't, though I have spoken to someone who has and he reckons what we have here is the kernel of the book, a kind of digested-watch version of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. And also that it captures its essence.

Coming to it fresh, it's a neat story about aforementioned missing cat and time travel, with a smattering of quantum physics and the fundamental connectedness of things. With a lovely performance from Doreen Mantle as the old lady/murderer. Stephen Mangan's good in the title role, too - a teeny bit irritating perhaps, but then Mangan is a teeny bit irritating. So is Dirk Gently, though - it's perfect. Funny too. Quite funny...

I have no idea how loyal the makers of BBC4's Dirk Gently were to Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, though I'd hazard a guess that a few liberties have been taken. The iPhones and Blackberrys were one giveaway; the various references to East 17 another. And, of course, the book's title has been truncated. Does it matter? Probably, to some of Adams's more devoted fans. In the context of last night's viewing, though, I'm inclined to think that for most of us it doesn't. Not a jot. Gently was so jolly, so rollickingly good natured, that to complain over such trivialities seems terribly poor form.

Gently is a detective. More than that: he is a holistic detective. He believes that everything is interconnected. And so when, on being hired to investigate the disappearance of an old lady's cat, he ran into an old friend from university, he was certain it was a clue. In a way, it was. The pair teamed up, tackling the triple mystery of Henry the cat's whereabouts, the departure of a businessman from a nearby warehouse, and the failing love life of MacDuff (the friend). What followed was a cartoonish series of escapades that saw Dirk prove his creativity, if not sleuthing skills, with his Scooby Doo-esque plans. He faked suicide to steal a set of psychiatric records, he hypnotised MacDuff to take him back in time (not literally, though there is some of that) and he pretended to be a patient at the practice of MacDuff's girlfriend. He found Henry, sort of - and a lot more besides. That nice old lady who hired him, for instance? Not quite as nice as she seemed.

Stephen Mangan - hitherto best known as Guy Secretan from Green Wing - was ideal casting as the hapless Dirk, and Darren Boyd just as perfect as MacDuff. Helen Baxendale, too, made a welcome return as MacDuff's disgruntled girlfriend. In fact, there wasn't very much you could fault about the production at all. Right down to the quirky camerawork and youthful, poppy soundtrack (who would have thought the Hoosiers could be so right in any situation?), the director, Damon Thomas, got it pretty spot-on. The result was a pleasingly festive-feeling adventure; part Wallace & Gromit, part Doctor Who, part The Secret Seven. And the best thing? There wasn't a Christmas tree in sight. Douglas Adams once claimed that Gently would make a better film character than his more famous hero, Arthur Dent. Based on last night's experience, he may well have been right.

There was a telling disclaimer on new detective series Dirk Gently. 'Based on the novel by Douglas Adams', it ran, not 'adapted from', and it was a subtle distinction. Acknowledging there was no way all the multifarious ideas that tumble from Adams's pages could squeeze into a TV show without bursting the screen, this was a trimmed-down version.

The first clue was in the pared-back title, which ditched Holistic Detective Agency from the Adams original in favour of the presumably more user-friendly Dirk Gently. Disconcertingly, this brought Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights to mind ('Dirk... gently'), so we were off to a rocky start. But, slowly, this new Dirk began to win me over.

Stephen Mangan, half-man, half-hair, is a perfect Dirk, a detective whose unshakeable belief in the fundamental interconnectedness between all things eliminates all the tedious legwork that most private detectives have to indulge in. Dirk simply wanders around observing stuff, looking for unlikely links, and Bob's your uncle. Well he is, if you look hard enough.

It's a spin on the butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing chaos theory and, in the Adams books, allows for superlative flights of comic scientific fantasy. The TV Dirk Gently takes a more prosaic approach, playing up comedy over drama, and - Schrödinger's cat aside - the science takes a back seat.

At times it felt forced, with a sense of trying slightly too hard when a touch more subtlety would have brought out the essential Adamsian eccentricity.

But there's plenty of mileage in Mangan's engaging mugging in a role that plays to his strengths in a way we haven't seen since Green Wing. He deserves a series but, if not, there is an upside: the fundamental interconnectedness of things should lead you back to the original Dirk Gently books, which have always unjustly played second fiddle to Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series.

Thanks to the brilliant Sherlock there's been something of a resurgence in kooky detective shows of late, the latest of which is Dirk Gently, a character plucked from Douglas Adams's cult novels. Adams is perhaps best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and this hour-long adaptation starring Stephen Mangan in the titular role will be pleasingly familiar to fans of the title. For those not in the know, Gently is a detective who works on the basis that everything from a missing cat to an exploding warehouse are fundamentally interconnected. The only problem is that he's a total shambles, and some people suspect he's just a scam artist...

Dirk Gently is a Douglas Adams creation, a shambolic and strange 'holistic' detective who runs an agency 'based on the fundamental interconnectedness of all things'. This pilot, from Misfits creator Howard Overman, delivers a enjoyably quirky adventure in which Dirk (Stephen Mangan) is asked to find a pensioner's missing cat - a case in which Dirk's old uni pal and his girlfriend are inexplicably caught up.

Dirk Gently interview

As the BBC prepares to air its adaptation of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently, here is an interview with Stephen Mangan, Helen Baxendale, Darren Boyd, and producer Chris Carey.