TV REVIEW – FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER
Created and Written by: Robert Popper (Peep Show, Look Around You)
Starring: Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird, Paul Ritter, Tom Rosenthal Mark Heap

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER, which premieres tonight on BBC America is at once the best and worst about all the family get togethers you’ve had since leaving your parents house – or in my case, until you realized how much more pleasant your life could be eating by yourself.

When I first heard the premise of FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER, I was instantly reminded of the Friday night dinners from Gilmore Girls, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the rapid fire dialog and jokes were one of the things I loved about the show and I like about most British comedy (ie – Fawlty Towers, The Catherine Tate Show, The Inbetweeners), though British comedy embraces silliness in a way that a show like Gilmore Girls never could.

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER centers around the Goodmans, a traditional but not always observant Jewish family whose weekly Friday night dinners see brothers Adam (Simon Bird, best known for his stellar work in The Inbetweeners) and Jonny (Tom Rosenthal), who’ve both left the nest, though from the constant pranks they play on each other, you’d never know. Their Mom, Jackie, (Tamsin Greig, from SHAUN OF THE DEAD and more recently, TAMARA DREWE) and Dad, Martin, (Paul Ritter) are as embarrassing as they’ve always been – or maybe have gotten worse with time. On top of that, creepy neighbor Jim (Mark Heap, who it took me a bit to recognize as Brian from Edgar Wright’s series SPACED) who’s terrified of his own dog, seems to appear at the most inopprotune times, making dinner anything but peaceful.

What makes this comedy different than some of the other British comedies I’ve seen is that it takes the general “rule of three” repetition rule of comedy and continues repeating things until they stop being funny and become utterly hilarious and insane. It’s remarkable how they’re able to completely circumvent any of the irritating stage of repetition that six year olds are so familiar with.

What I also really loved about the show what how completely it revels in its juvenile behavior. Things like putting salt in water glasses, prank texts, and popping out of garbage bags are taken to such an extreme and are done with such relish that they become sublime by the time we see the prank reach its conclusion at the end of an episode.

While I have loved Simon Bird in his run on The Inbetweeners (a FANTASTIC show if you haven’t seen it), I almost thought that FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER was a spin-off series of The Inbetweeners because Adam from this series and Will McKenzie are very, very similar: both are headstrong, polite and proper to a fault, and have a penchant for saying “brilliant” whenever possible. Additionally, while Mark Heap disappears into his character Jim, for me it seemed in places that he reappeared in to Stephen Root’s character Milton, from OFFICE SPACE – perhaps it was the haircut.

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER does take a little while to find its voice, but by the last of the three episodes I’ve seen, it seems to get there, and I have a feeling by the end of the first series, it will fit more comfortably into the Ministry of Laughs block on BBC America.

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER premieres tonight, Saturday July 30th, at 11:30pm on BBC America.
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