Puppy Love

Puppy Love to be adapted in USA

Axed BBC sitcom Puppy Love is to return - but in the States.

BBC Four's 'Puppy Love' cancelled after one season

BBC Four has cancelled Puppy Love, the latest comedy series from Getting On co-creators Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, after airing one six episode season, TVWise can reveal.

Five episodes in, Puppy Love remains perfectly pleasant viewing, but still feels frustratingly less than the sum of its parts. It has all the requisite ingredients of a successful modern sitcom - cheerfully complicated families, gently simmering class conflict, and fine lead turns by Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine - but it still feels too amiable for its own good. Tonight, Pepperdine's neurotic middle-class matriarch Naomi meets the long-absent brother of Scanlan's caravan-dwelling dog-trainer, with surprising consequences.

Radio Times review

As this series scampers along, it feels less like a comedy and more like a family drama with the odd moment raising a chuckle. Which isn't to say it's not a pleasurable half-hour in the company of Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine as Nana V and Naomi Singh, now reeling at the news they're about to become gran and great-gran to Eron and Jasmine's baby.

Tonight's guest spot goes to Phil Cornwell as V's grotty, errant brother, Fatdraic. He offers Naomi unexpected succour when her marriage breaks down and spikes the Rice Krispie cakes that the youngsters are smuggling into prison. Naomi and V must take swift action.

Sunetra Sarker on Puppy Love: I'm not great with dogs!

Casualty star Sunetra Sarker has a cameo in Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's new comedy Puppy Love on BBC Four... that would be as well as making it to week 10 in this year's Strictly. So with all that good fun/ hard work in hand - how does she keep going?

TV review: Puppy Love, Episode 4, BBC Four

I think I know where Puppy Love is going wrong. They actually seem to have played down the presence of pooches in an effort to avoid the humans being upstaged. Yet what's the point in creating a sitcom about dog lovers and not featuring lovely dogs? Puppy Love is good, but it could have been so much better.

The increasingly enjoyable comic drama continues with charity trustee Jepherson Denomer visiting the Wirral peninsula, with social mountaineer Naomi desperate to make everything run smoothly despite the continually erratic enthusiasm of her problem pup. With Jep's elderly canine companion in tow, it's Nana V who finds herself sharing common ground with the VIP. Not that life is especially sunny Chez Fazackerley, thanks to the unerring medical knowhow possessed by innominate hound No Name.

Radio Times review

Naomi is at the vet's, keen to get Charlie, her uncontrollable lab, neutered, while Nana V is convinced something's amiss with her mutt, No Name. But could No Name actually have detected a health problem in V? These two women, divided by class and background, keep bumping into each other, but there are now signs that they might have more in common than dogs, teenage children and Naomi's charity Future'Z.

This is a ramshackle but charming episode, with one or two honking laughs, but at its heart is the sad story of an old hound on his last legs. Are Naomi and V about to bond?

Sunetra Sarker on Puppy Love: I'm not great with dogs!

Casualty star Sunetra Sarker has a cameo in Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's new comedy Puppy Love on BBC Four... that would be as well as making it to week 10 partnering Brendan Cole in this year's Strictly. So with all that good fun/hard work in hand - how does she keep going?

TV review: Puppy Love, episode 3, BBC4

Right, I'm sticking with this like a dog with a bone. The third instalment of this dodgy doggy sitcom finds Nana V (Joanna Scanlan) more hard up than ever and Naomi Singh (Vicki Pepperdine) more snobby than ever.