 Day 9, British sitcom Garth Meringue's Dark Place, suggested by Harvey van Veltum and seconded by 19 people. As he noted, all six episodes are free on YouTube, and fam, y'all gotta see this. So bad it's good is a phrase that definitely gets overused, but I think it can be valuable in describing a very specific type of art. Works made with true belief in their greatness by people who, unfortunately for them, but perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, are just truly inept. But, for it to qualify, that conflict must exist. They must believe in the goodness and greatness of what they're making. If they understand what it is they're putting out into the world, if there's even a hint of self-awareness, then it's really not bad at all. You aren't liking it ironically if it was created ironically. You like it on exactly the level you were intended to. But being intentionally bad can only get you so far. I mean, I enjoyed the VFX car on fire bit from the beginning of Velocipaster, but I tell you what, I didn't see the rest of that movie for the same reason I haven't seen any Sharknados for the same reason I only watch like 15 minutes of Thanksgiving, etc, etc. It gets old and boring real fast. Comedy is hard, and most of the people who make these things aren't great at it in the long term. Also, like, I'd rather watch something that's trying to be good than something that's trying to be bad, you know, especially now when self-awareness has become a default mode of being a fallback instead of something fresh. But much of that was not the case in 2004, a year notable both for beginning the room's upward trajectory into the so bad it's good Hall of Fame, and also the year that Garth Marengi's Dark Place was doing to horror TV what police squad did to the police procedural in the early 80s. Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness made their parodic love letter to bad genre television with the slightest bit of a mockumentary twist and made something that I'm genuinely furious I didn't know about until three days ago. Garth Marengi's Dark Place, as you might expect, follows one Garth Marengi, a hugely prolific, if not necessarily influential, horror author who decades before decided to make a foray into screenwriting, directing, and acting. He made the show on a less than shoestring budget, but it never actually aired, and now he says the networks that shunt him have come crawling back mouths open for some lemon Marengi pie. In this season we see six of the supposed 50 to 67 episodes that were produced, each of which is occasionally intercut with modern-day talking head segments featuring Marengi, his producing partner Dean Lerner, and one of the other actors on the show. And of course, Marengi and Lerner are just so infatuated with what they've made believing that it was truly revolutionary while also admitting that like episode two wasn't long enough for distribution so they just had to keep making sequences play out in slow motion or that the mist in episode five was actually poisonous and killed two members of the technical crew. The whole thing is structured around your typical monster of the weak horror sci-fi scenario. After a portal to hell is opened in episode one at Dark Plays Hospital where Marengi's Dr. Rick Daglis works, conditions are ripe to set up any number of wild and crazy situations, but it's less that the situations themselves are all that wild or even where they end up, it's all about the journey. And oh what a journey it is. Each episode is full of weird performances, ridiculous continuity errors, so many guns and any number of other gags to remind you of how cheaply it was made and how incompetent the people behind the camera really were. And I clicked with it pretty much immediately, even before the show within a show got going, right from the little introduction that you get in each episode of Marengi reading and infuriatingly self-indulgent passage from one of his novels before introducing himself. The pomposity never lets up for a moment, and it made me laugh basically every time. By the time that the show within a show played its opening titles, about five minutes in, I was completely hooked. And by the time a human being literally exploded, followed by a super 80 yard, are you all right? Around the 13 minute mark I was like howling with laughter. And every single episode had one of those moments, one resulting in literal shrieks of joy, and some had several. To be clear, there were chuckles aplenty in between the full and convulsions, but I don't laugh really hard all that often, and certainly not as much as I'd like to, so when it comes, it's always a wonderful thing. And the fact that this series hit that in the double digits in less than two and a half hours is a testament to its comedic chops and the value of having actual comedians do this shit. And really, I think that six 23-ish minute episodes is a perfect length as well. American sitcoms typically run 13 or 22 episodes per season, while British comedies are more like half that. A six episode season is pretty standard across the pond, which ensures that the show never outstays its welcome. No filler, all killer. And like, I fully believe that these guys could have continued making compelling stories in this world and come up with new ways of being so bad they're good, but eventually the premise would run stale and these stilted performances would start to grate. And yeah, they could have made one or two really good episodes about the inevitability of diminishing returns, but a series that ends too soon is also generally one that ends on a high. 8.8 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Zaracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great, if not, oh well, if you want to see more suggestions for what I should do in a few days. Bye!