In Australia: Wednesdays, 9pm, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired
Revivals of sitcoms are a big thing at the moment in the US. Will & Grace is already back and is prepping its second season right now; Roseanne came back, went away after it did a very silly thing, and is now coming back again as The Conners; Murphy Brown is about to make her return on CBS; and talks are in progress for a revival of Frasier in some form or another. Mad About You almost made it back, too.
But who says Australia can’t join in, too? Very Small Business was an ABC sitcom that aired in 2008, written by and starring Wayne Hope and Kim Gyngell. It sees journalist Gyngell hired by Hope to be the sole employee of Worldwide Business Group, a company that publishes magazines such as Music, Music, Music, Music, solely so that Hope can trick people into buying adverts.
Whether it was much loved – or indeed any good – I can’t say, since 2008 was way before TMINE took Australian TV under its wing. It looks quite fun from the trailer. However, it only lasted one season, so either they were six perfect episodes with no need for more to be said or something else happened that meant it never got a second season.
Until now.
Back in Back in Very Small Business
Because hitting the airwaves just a decade after it first aired is season two, aka Back In Very Small Business, which sees Gyngell and Hope reunited behind and in front of the screens at Worldwide Business Group, which now appears to have expanded into something a lot bigger. No publishing seems to be going on anymore – instead, it does everything from washing dogs to importing mysterious items from Vietnam.
Aiding Gyngell and Hope are the next generation of would-be business people (both of whom were in the first season, too). Hope’s daughter (Ronny Chieng: International Student‘s Molly Daniels) is a doyenne of social media, a party girl who talks in impenetrable teen jargon and spends her time hanging out with Australian Football League players, to get them to endorse products on Instagram for her before their managers find out. Then there’s Gyngell’s daughter Leslie (now played by Emma Leonard), who’s a graphic designer. Except she’s not his. Or his daughter, since she’s transitioning.
There’s also a few random additional employees, including obsequious Indian stereotype Roy Joseph and Korean student stereotype Aaron Chen. But for the most part it’s about Hope, Daniels and to a lesser extent Gyngell.
Hope’s character is a sort of love child of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, Gareth Cheeseman from Coogan’s Run and David Brent from The Office. He’s got high ambitions of being a rich, successful businessman but he has minimal talent. He talks the business talk, usually with offensive racist, sexist or sexual language, usually without knowing the offence he’s causing (“Single-digit growth. It’s like having a partial erection. You either go rock hard or you put your pants up and forget about it”, “I’d like to show you my wad later”). But he can’t walk the walk (“How many followers have you got?” “…12. What? That’s how many Jesus started with”) and so spends most of the first episode promising deals that quickly fall apart.
Meanwhile, Gyngell is a misery fest, but he has at least some sales skills. It’s just that whenever he’s about to close a deal, Hope shows up to ruin it by trying to show off his own skills.
Much-loved?
All of which is a bit funny, but you’d be hard pushed from this first episode to know why anyone thought it a good idea to resurrect the show after a decade’s absence. It maybe has something to say about declining relevance in middle age, but that’s about it, as far as Gyngell and Hope’s characters are concerned. It basically feels like all those very late one-off specials for Only Fools and Horses where everyone was going through the motions but without that the same drive.
Oddly, though, it’s actually at its most interesting when Daniels is around, since bizarrely, despite being aimed it an older generation, it does seem to be quite down with the kids. A show based around Daniels and Leonard trying to run a business together in the age of social media – a sort of Very Small Business: The Next Generation if you like – would actually work a whole lot better than this, I reckon, which just feels a bit tired in comparison.
I might watch the second episode to see how things develop, since there are glimmers of humour and good writing at various points and not all of them confined to Daniels and Leonard. But as with some of the recent US revivals, Very Small Business feels like a show that should have been fondly remembered, rather than brought back to life.
In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime. Starts September 9
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Atlantic to air in November 2018
Jim Carrey’s one of those ‘dangerous’ actors. Not in a Clayne Crawford way, mind, more in the sense that you don’t know what he’s going to do with his performances. His characters might snap and go a bit crazy at any moment and you never know when and what they’ll do next. But when they do snap, he’s mesmerising to watch.
After a hugely successful career in comedy that began on TV with Saturday Night Live before he got his big movie break with The Mask and Ace Ventura, he branched out into more sober affairs with The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Since then, bar the occasional cameo, he’s been missing from both TV and movie screens for some time now.
Which makes Kidding, his first regular TV role for 20 years, an interesting choice. Will it be funny? Serious? Dangerous? Or maybe none of the above.
Catherine Keener as Deirdre and Jim Carrey as Jeff (aka Mr Pickles) in Kidding
When will he snap?
Kidding sees Carrey playing ‘Mr Pickles’, an icon of children’s television and a beacon of kindness and wisdom for America’s youth for generations. Anyone expecting that to be a cover for something darker will be disappointed, as Carrey’s character is pretty much as he seems on the tin – a kind-hearted man with no real desire to be anything except lovely to everyone, particularly children.
However, life can be cruel and behind the scenes, Carrey is dealing with some hard challenges: one of his twin sons was killed in a road accident and his wife (Judy Greer) is now separated from him and seeing another man (Justin Kirk). Pickles wants to process all of this misery in his own way, by giving America’s children a Very Special Edition of the programme that’s all about death and how to deal with it. But his father (Frank Langella), who also happens to be the show’s producer, vetos the idea because it might destroy the multi-million dollar empire that has been built up around Carrey’s wholesome nature and his puppet friends.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg, what with all the problems Carrey’s sister (Catherine Keener) faces, too, so the question is whether Carrey will snap and if so, when? And if he doesn’t let it all out, is a slow descent into madness the only alternative? Moving into the house next door so he can keep an eye on his wife might just be the start of something far, far worse…
Good by association
Although billed as a ‘slow leak of sanity as hilarious as it is heartbreaking’, Kidding is really just heartbreaking in its first episode at least. For the most part, you’re only going to laugh if you enjoy kind people being hurt, tormented, socially excluded and reviled, while struggling to cope with the vicissitudes of life – and a whole bunch of sad but kindly puppets look on sadly and kindly as it happens.
But then, The Truman Show isn’t a bundle of laughs until Carrey starts to go a bit strange, so we should probably hold off expecting the laughs until later in the season, too. Do we have the patience for this? Maybe, as it’s only a half-hour episode at a time.
More to the point, there’s the top cast and the show’s creator is Eternal Sunshine writer Michel Gondry. That probably means we should assume it’ll be good by association, right? I mean, if they can get cameos from Danny Trejo and Conan O’Brien in the first episode, it must be good, right? Right?
Despite the sad evidence so far.
So I don’t really want to watch any more of it, based on what I’ve seen. It’s good at what it does, but there’s nothing that makes me want to watch more of it. Yet I feel I probably should, which is an odd place to be in. I’ll probably watch at least the first three episodes, but I do wonder if maybe we’re only going to see a full Carrey explosion when it’s too late.
