Year: 2016

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, TBS
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Me: Hey guys, this is an interactive one. So, are you ready? 

You: Yes we are!

Me: Cool. What’s the secret of comedy?

You: We don’t know, Rob. What is the secret…

Me [interrupts]: Timing!

Rubbish, hey? Doesn’t work at all written down. But I laboured with it because I think it makes a valuable point – timing is very important in comedy. Get it wrong and your joke just isn’t funny.

What’s the right time for a TV parody of another TV show then? The answer’s not immediately obvious. Consider, ‘Allo, ‘Allo, one of the most successful British sitcoms of the 80s and early 90s, running for 85 episodes over 10 years from 1982.

Huge numbers of people watched (or were too offended to watch) this sitcom about the wartime French resistance without being even slightly aware it was a parody of Secret Army, the BBC’s outstanding and very dark wartime drama, which ran between 1977 and 1979. 

Three years between the finish of Secret Army (not including Secret Army spin-off Kessler in 1981) and the start of ‘Allo ‘Allo, and yet everyone had already forgotten what the show was parodying. Thank heavens ‘Allo ‘Allo was funny, hey?

So spare a thought for Wrecked, which has bizarrely chosen to parody Lost, which aired between 2004 and 2010. That’s six years ago Lost finished and 12 years since its first episode aired, yet here’s Wrecked doing an almost scene-by-scene parody of its first episodes, but imagining what would happen if only the ugly no-hopers, rather than the pretty talented ones survived the crash.

How good’s your memory? Good enough to laugh at how accurate Wrecked is? Probably not.

The first two episodes tread the familiar-ish terrority of the initial plane crash, waking up on the beach, the tending to the wounded, the investigation of the island, looking for satellite phone signal, et al. The show’s anal enough about its Lost lore that it even kills off its Jack (James Scott) in the first episode, as per Lost‘s original pilot script. In his stead, he leaves three also-rans (Zach Cregger, Asif Ali, Brian Sacca), who all look like someone more famous but certainly aren’t quite as good; there’s Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords) as the Locke of the piece, albeit a Locke who can’t walk; there’s a generic bunch of millennial women who whine a bit (Ginger Gonzaga, Jessica Lowe, Ally Maki); and there’s a couple of people who hang around being dicks in different ways (Will Greenberg, Brooke Dillman). 

Wrecked tries to get its laughs by doing sixth-form grade pastiche of the original, while throwing in general ineptitude, people arguing over whether a podiatrist is a proper doctor or not, and pointing out that no one knows any phone numbers any more so can’t call for help using someone else’s phone. As an example of the level of humour we’re dealing with here, when Sacca’s dad appears to him and Sacca wonders if they were coincidentally on the same flight, dad replies: “No, this is a dream sequence… were you not getting that?”

Oddly, Lost‘s most iconic storytelling technique – the flashback/flashforward/flashsideways – isn’t used in Wrecked in these first two episodes, everything being told linearly. Too complicated, the writers had forgotten about it or something being saved for later? I don’t know, but it’s a bit like setting Allo Allo in Swindon during the Cod War without it.

Neither an incisive parody of Lost nor funny in its own right, Wrecked is a great big dud, despite the obvious cash spent on CGI and location filming in Puerto Rico and the occasionally interesting guest cast (eg Eliza Coupe from Happy Endings). I guess timing really is everything.

Here’s the first six minutes and a trailer, just so you can see if you agree with me.