The Wrong Mans

Peep Show meets the Coens in this noirish comedy, as two office workers (Mat Baynton and James Corden) are drawn into a testy gangland conflict. A slightly unlikely mish-mash of genres, but one that comes off as both stylish and fun.

James Corden laughing in the face of danger

The series looks wonderful, expensive and moody and there are several amazing cameos in it (David Harewood, late of Homeland, appeared for a few bewildering seconds). All this just seemed rather wasteful in the circumstances: the script somehow doesn't live up to it.

I'm not sure who Jim is in The Wrong Mans (BBC Two). But he phones Mr Stevens just at the right time. Or the wrong time, depending on how you see things and how you see James Corden in particular. You see, Mr Stevens, whose wife has been kidnapped by Mr Lau, has Corden's character Phil in a car crusher. It exerts 150 tonnes of pressure and can crush a car in 45 seconds, so it's not going to have much trouble with Phil, Mr Stevens tells him.

I think it's another film spoof. Goldfinger, Kick-Ass, Superman III, Pulp Fiction again? All of the above possibly. I know there's Hitchcock in there but I haven't been spotting all the film references in The Wrong Mans.

Go on then, Mr Stevens, let's see it, please! There are some - me included - who think that James Corden would be much improved by being subjected to 150 tonnes of pressure and crushed into a more compact cube-shaped version of James Corden. Where's his head? Oh, I see, round there, ha, yes I think that works.

No, I'm not being fattest, I'm being guffest. Meaning I'd like to see the guff, the hot air, all the shouting and laddishness, maybe the contents of his colon too, squeezed out of him. And if that makes him smaller, and cuboid, and therefore more easily stored away somewhere, then so much the better. I'm not a massive fan, can you tell? But then this bloody Jim rings, and Mr Stevens changes his mind about crushing Phil.

I'm not a massive fan of The Wrong Mans either. As I mentioned the other day, I suspect that Corden and Mathew Baynton are more performers than writers. This feels like they've sat down together, chuckling at everything and chucking everything at it - their favourite movies, a bag of poo, an awful lot of themselves, obviously. They've had a brilliant time making it ... yup, that's it, self-indulgence; I think they're having a much better time than I'm having, and I'm not sure that's how TV should be. Even though the BBC has clearly thrown a whole lot of money at it it, because these are big comedy stars and they've got some famous guests coming on too, it still doesn't work, because it's not smart enough in the first place. A comedy thriller that's too silly to be thrilling and not funny enough to be funny.

Oddly, I seem to be a little bit on my own here, and everyone else thinks it's brilliant. Yeah, well, everyone else is an idiot too then.

'The Wrong Mans' drops over 900,000 viewers in week two

The Wrong Mans kept above 2 million viewers for its second episode on Tuesday, according to overnight data.

Mat Baynton and James Corden's comedy thriller continues. Their two hapless office workers have been kidnapped and need to do some fast talking to explain it all. The plot developments aren't that interesting in themselves (competing factions are after some missing money), so much of the humour relies on the disparity between the mundane everyday and a violent underworld. Baynton's Sam - vulnerable yet principled - is the more interesting of the pair, while Corden is either naive or annoyingly boorish, depending on your viewpoint.

If you couldn't tell that The Wrong Mans was a Big Deal from the explosive trailers and high production values, then the quality of the supporting cast should confirm it: Dougray Scott, Sarah Solemani, Benedict Wong, Emilia Fox, Nick Moran, Dawn French, Tom Basden...

Even more impressively, each turn (Fox and French excepted, although we suspect there'll be more to come there) makes an impression, while creator-stars Mat Baynton and James Corden nail the odd couple dynamic that keeps this occasionally leaky vessel afloat. We join Sam (Baynton) and Phil (Corden) drifting further out of their depth at the hands of psychotic gangsters Moran and Wong, before a show-stopping presentation from Sam saves his professional hide while bringing the danger even closer to home.

It's in these collisions of the workaday and the white knuckle that The Wrong Mans works best, as the more traditional thriller elements stubbornly fail to coalesce with any conviction. But it's never dull and frequently very funny.

The Wrong Mans episode 2 review

Hmm. The comedy/action thing didn't quite work as well this week, did it?

A town planner's view of The Wrong Mans

James Corden and Mathew Baynton's new comedy of council staff engulfed by a sinister plot gets some things spot-on - but planners are more fun in real life, says Derek Carnegie.

I quite enjoyed the beginning of The Wrong Mans (BBC Two), this new (very) British comedy crime caper written by and starring Matthew Baynton and James Corden. Bayton's character, Sam, gets up with a hangover while flashing back to a wild evening before. Then there's a car crash, which is surprising.

After which it surprises - and I liked it - less. In Sam's council office, where we meet James Corden (who plays James Corden - I'm not his number one fan, I'm afraid), it seems to be trying to be a bit like The Office, though less subtle and a decade on. Then, in a hospital, there's a hint of Green Wing about it, with the same speeding-up-the-action trick, but without the surreal joy. This is pretty crude, most of the humour based on mix-ups and misunderstanding (a trolley swap would have been funnier if the wrong leg had actually been amputated, instead of nearly amputated, though admittedly it would have made Bayton's role harder afterward). Nor am I gnawing my knuckles at the tension.

My editor, who is sane and wise and who has seen more of it, says it gets better. Hope so, because so far I'm not convinced by a comedy/thriller that isn't doing it for me as either. Nor that performers (mainly) necessarily make the best writers. Oh, and what's with that title? There's something wrong with it, isn't there? Grammatically?

James Corden on the right track with The Wrongs Man

Comic duos are built on sharp contrasts and Corden and Baynton have got them all going on: fat and thin, optimist and pessimist, extrovert and introvert. It's a winning combination of clashes and, though the first episode of The Wrong Mans has to work overtime to set up its elaborate plot and characters, it fulfilled the essential law of opening episodes: it left me wanting more. In fact, the one thing working against The Wrong Mans is its length.