Peep Show

Peep Show to return for seventh series

Channel 4 has commissioned a seventh series of Bafta-winning sitcom Peep Show before the sixth series has even aired. C4 entertainment and comedy head Andrew Newman confirmed that Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's sitcom would return for a further series, which is slated for next year. It is next due on screens this summer.

How many sitcoms do you know that are still funny after five seasons? Particularly British ones, that generally struggle after three. Amazingly, Peep Show has yet to slip up, although this season definitely missed a trick in not making the fallout to Mark's failed marriage more central. Indeed, this year didn't have a strong hook week-to-week, but thankfully ended on a cliffhanger that will ensure season 6 fares much better.

To be honest, this has been a rather uneven fifth series of the Croydon flat-mate sitcom. At its best - in the second and fifth episodes - it's been bang on form and hilarious, but it's often been middling, verging on average. There's been the odd great line here and there, but nothing to write home about.

At the end of it all, you're left wondering if a fifth series was really for the best. Perhaps nipping things in the bud at the end of the fourth season - when things had reached a suitable moment to exit - would have been for the best. Ten out of ten for effort, though.

It is the texture of the writing that excels. Has anyone rendered the thought-processes of neurotic perpetual-adolescent males with more hilarious precision?

Jessie Armstrong and Sam Bain's sitcom continues to plumb the darker depths of the human condition with blisteringly funny results.

There's definitely a case for Mitchell and Webb to be on the TV 52 weeks of the year, as long as the quality of their own series and that of Peep Show continues. Last nights second of the new run was excellent, and easily the second funniest show of the day (after, naturally, Have I Got News For You hosted by Bill Bailey)!

Radio Times Blog

Peep Show is wonderful, a model of edgy comedy perfection, with sharply brilliant, misanthropic, literate scripts from writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and perfectly deadpan performances by David Mitchell and Robert Webb].

Unlike the patchy That Mitchell and Webb Look, Peep Show draws on the strengths of writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain.

Mark and Jez's theatre visit produced some great lines - I can't believe coming here costs more than a film and If this was on television, nobody would be watching. There was a spot-on realism here that perhaps got lost in the outrageous antics of the last season.

The only question is: five series in, where is there for the characters to go? On the evidence of the opener, it should be fun finding out.

It was Peep Show business as usual, with Mark trying to pass off his fearfulness as moral principle, Jez having no principles at all and almost every line proving quotably great.

Admittedly, the plot did get a bit bogged down in the second half. Even so, now that both Have I Got News for You and Peep Show have returned, Friday nights are back the way they should be.

Peep Show returned on Friday evening to further explore the almost limitless sleaziness - moral, physical and intellectual - of Jeremy and Mark.

This week, they found themselves locked into a double date at the theatre, a prospect that appalled Mark. Relax, Jeremy reassured him. It's all different now... they've moved on. They use proper actors, you know, Americans, and people off the telly, and they're all based on films, so its fine.. Scabrous slapstick and base motives are the core of the comedy, but that kind of leftfield detail is what gilds it.