Sitcom surbubia with spots, guardian.co.uk
Whether it's a prison, an office, a hotel, a social class or a family, the best sitcoms deal with characters who are trapped in an exquisitely infuriating situation. From Harold Steptoe to Michael Bluth to Ted Crilley; their attempts to escape breed these great comic creations.
So, it's no surprise that two of the most frustrating situations with the best comic potential - adolescence and suburbia - are being tackled by E4 in its first original sitcom, The Inbetweeners, which continues tonight at 10pm .
Although the humour of the first two episodes owed more to American Pie's grossness than Steptoe's latent tragedy, the show still manages to catch the crap banter of the average 17-year-old within the frame of crap romance, crap pubs, crap house parties and a crap town pretty perfectly.
It's surprising that it's taken this long to put teenage and suburbia together. Reggie Perrinand The Officec aptured the suburban experience pretty brilliantly, but now the success of Skinshas made it easier for TV channels to trust young actors to carry more grown-up series. Suburbia and the uselessness of many 17-year-old boys (my past self included) ought to provide Inbetweeners writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris with enough set pieces for a couple of seasons.
The Radio Times review of the show complained that "nothing rings true" about The Inbetweeners, but the thorough averageness of its setting makes it a more realistic riposte to the super-trendy world of Tony Stonem and company in Skins.
The Inbetweeners focuses its attentions on the more banal misadventures of its gang of teenage boys. Witness Will erupting in rage at being refused bar service in a carvery pub and managing to get his whole year group evicted at the same time. Or accusing his friend's dad of sexual assault. Or Simon spray-painting his love for his friend Carly on her dad's drive. Add to this low-rent indie music and house parties where the host's parents are sheltered upstairs. Obviously it's wildly exaggerated for lolz among its teen audience but the tone of the show ultimately proves more accurate for many sixth-formers than the glossy (but still excellently realised) Skins.
I spoke to the writers of some of the recent crop of shows about teenagers, including 20-year-old Tim Dawson who wrote the yet-to-be-broadcast Coming of Agefor BBC3 and the creators of Skins and The Inbetweeners and they agreed that the hormonal headspin of being teenaged, still fairly immature and trapped in a thoroughly average town mean that the emotional importance of relationships with the opposite sex and your friends can be blown up to disproportionate levels. This can make for cringing comedy gold, as viewers of The Inbetweeners might recognise when they follow the hapless Simon's pathetic attempts to woo Carly in the second of last week's episodes.
But, while being a suburban teenager may feel like a shackle, we all know (even as kids) that it's really quite safe. We might have thought that the local ring road was a metaphorical Berlin Wall to the bohemian explosion of creativity that would envelop one's self while studying English Lit at Birmingham - but if you grew up anywhere else than in this comfy trap where would the fun be at college?
You might be the coolest person in Oldham (which I wasn't by any means) but at the end of the day you're still only the coolest person in Oldham. Without the 21st-century poetic brutalism of the retail park you'd never appreciate the joys of big city life.
As The Inbetweeners proves - and Coming of Age may do too - being a teenager in suburbia may be intolerable, but ultimately it's usually quite an enlightening and fulfilling experience - not to mention a funny one.
The Inbetweeners, though obviously aimed at crude teenage boys (is there any other kind?), captures the pathetic sixth-form male experience quite splendidly.
Inbetweeners 'more realistic than Skins' - Digitalspy.co.uk
Simon Bird has said that his show The Inbetweeners gives viewers a more realistic depiction of teenage life than Skins.
The actor, who plays Will Mackenzie in the show, told the BBC that the cast often misbehave on set because they are dressed in school uniform.
Bird said: "Skins is great because it's this fantasy of what you want your teenage years to be whereas The Inbetweeners is what your teenage years actually were."
Co-star Joe Thomas said: "The Inbetweeners is more the time you spend not having the night that you thought you were gonna be having."
"Waiting to get somewhere, waiting for a bus to take you to a village [where] you might get into somebody's house party, that's the territory that we're involved in."
Last Night’s Television: The Inbetweeners, E4, independent.co.uk
Bit by bit, the series has plenty to recommend it. The acting's strong, especially from half-dozen or so main players. And it's properly funny, too. But – well, what to say? – it's just not Skins. There's no sex (aside from a failed attempt at fumbling from their teacher "paedo Kennedy"), no drugs (just a half-bottle of vodka that Will seems to think can be shared between – get this – the whole class). And, crucially, there's none of that knuckle-gnawing self-importance that characterises most teen show. Which, perhaps, is the problem: instead of laughing with the characters, we're laughing at them, at their naiveté, their youth. In fact, it's almost impossible to avoid the feeling that it has been written for adults, or, if not for adults, then by adults without much memory of adolescence. Most teenagers don't view themselves as quite the humorous bundle of awkwardness and charm that they seem here. That's something you develop later, a convenient way off shrugging of your own humiliating youth. Or maybe not, perhaps retrospect, like padded bras and pregnancy, arrives earlier with each generation. But for the moment, my teenage companion wasn't impressed. "It's rubbish," she grunted. "Not at all like Gossip Girl."
Hedgy comedy, guardian.co.uk
When The Inbetweeners debuted on E4 last year, what was so striking about it wasn't the fact that it managed to mimic the crap conversations of your average sixth former. It was that it did so without repulsing all but the most pottymouthed of teens. It's no mean feat, as BBC3's dismal teen comedy Coming Of Age proved.
The boys in The Inbetweeners range from pretty smart to pretty dumb to socially competent(ish). They're the kind of idiots whose day of bunking off school culminates in being sick on a seven-year-old's head, ending up in a London nightclub wearing a tramp's shoes and managing to get stuck at sea 10 metres away from a harbour. Unlike the polymer teens of most US dramas, they're the kids we actually were, rather than the ones we imagined we were.
Co-creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, whose other credits include Peep Show, Flight Of The Conchords and Free Agents, grew up on opposite sides of London in towns 40 miles apart from each other. Towns that, when they scouted locations for the show, they realised were exactly the same. And it's their suburban lives that provide the basis for Will, Simon, Jay and Neil's misadventures.
"I thought that my suburban existence was horrific," says Beesley. "I was desperate to get out, it seemed like a terrible place to grow up. I remember being 16 and sitting in my mum's kitchen and thinking to myself: 'If I end up here in 20 years' time in a house like this, I'm going to kill myself.' But then I stepped back into one of the houses when we were filming and I thought, 'Ooh, I can begin to see the appeal now.'"
"The key thing about suburbia as a setting," agrees Morris, "is that however cool you are, you're still only cool in suburbia. You can be the coolest person in Chertsey if you want to be, but you're still only the coolest person in Chertsey. There's something inherently comic about that."
The Inbetweeners - Reviews, TV & Radio - The Independent.co.uk
The main laughs derive from the exquisitely accurate dialogue, capturing the feel of adolescence perfectly. Jokes about mums and dads, jokes about lack of sex, all subtly crafted into the dialogue, make you laugh, simply because you would be able to hear the same conversation in your local Topman at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. And that is why it is utterly charming. It never tries to be anything it's not, it never pretends to raise moral issues or tackle strong taboos, it simply shows that being a teenager can be fun after all. For no-frills, unadulterated high-spirited camaraderie between four mates, The Inbetweeners simply cannot be beaten.
The Inbetweeners, avclub.com
All four of the guys at the center of this show are well-drawn people, the kinds of kids you might have gone to high school with yourself (if you went to a British public school, I guess). Refreshingly, none of them seems to belong to an outright clique or social group. All of them are just floating through the cracks, hoping to get by. (Hence the title.) By committing to telling stories about these four specific guys and the other people in their lives, The Inbetweenerspushes past any groaning about stories you've seen before to remind you that things become cliches because, well, they happen a lot in real life too.
But as funny as the show is (and it's very funny), the best thing about it is the fact that it has at its center four guys who are just feeling their ways toward adulthood, even if they don't yet quite grasp what that will mean. They're as awkward around the opposite sex as you probably were at that age, as desperate to have a good time that lets them forget their humdrum lives as you probably were at that age and as much in love with a good laugh with friends as you probably were at that age. The Inbetweenersdoesn't have a fresh, exciting new premise, but it does all of the little things right, and that level of craftsmanship is well worth tuning in for.
Lastly - cracking article from the makers of Inbetweeners in the Guardian.
