 I can't believe I thought I could do this it looks so tired oh my god yep yeah that'll that'll fix it all right I see what we got just so dumb I don't even know why I still do this it's an in-joke two years ago whatever no one cares about any of this should accept me I don't even know if I do day 19 peep show suggested by Christopher Lewis and seconded by 26 people seems that folks are learning that I've not really watched any British sitcoms I don't like cringe comedy or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I don't like watching cringe comedy and I think it is important to preface all of this with that fact because peep show is as blatant an example of cringe comedy as I have ever seen so what happens when I watch an uncomfortable situation where say a man is alone with the woman who thinks he's hot and he thought that she was hot until he was told incorrectly as it turns out that she has cancer and now he's just being really weird and calling her brave and whatever and she's like hey we should make out and he doesn't want to because he thinks she has cancer which is bad enough but but he goes along with it because he thinks that he has to because she works in the music industry and he wants to be an artist and it's not who you know it's who you blow right well when I see something like that I pause it I get up walk around maybe do a couple of push-ups or something and make some sort of distressed noise because I really don't do well in uncomfortable situations and I will do a whole lot in my real life to avoid any sort of conflict wherein I have to feel uncomfortable which is to say it took me about twice as long to watch the first season of peep show as it should have but despite the figuratively literal psychological damage it did to me I had a pretty good time like shocker right this thing that people like that ran for nine seasons and apparently still holds the title as Channel 4's longest running sitcom is good actually what a fabulous addition to the discourse but since we're now nearly 20 years out from the series premiere and I'm sure there'll be all kinds of celebrations in 2023 I think it's worth considering what it's like to start from the beginning and my first and primary thought about it is that holy shit best friends slash roommates slash protagonists mark and jezz are genuinely terrible people and and that's the joke obviously and we're not supposed to think that they are in the right in any of these situations but it still results in a lot of ugly monologuing about women and gay men in particular like season one episode four is all about mark trying to figure out if he's attracted to another man it's the way that it plays out especially jezz's plotline it doesn't feel great in 2022 you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb do a great job of being fun but I don't think that their characters are terrible in a fun way if you were to replace mark's voice track in particular with the same dialogue said flatly you would be most of the way to a maniac prequel series due to sketch as fuck and the fact that he is never really punished for any of the weird shit he does is truly baffling to me like he pees in his boss's desk after being passed over for a promotion and gets um sent to a therapist and it's hardly as though that's the first fireball offense we have seen from him and presumably he has done many more before that and maybe this is just me the American not understanding UK labor protections or something but jesus christ how does he still have a job like if there was some indication that mark was actually really good at what he did or something it would bother me less and feel like maybe that was commenting on how men can get away with gross behavior but as it is it's just odd going back to the maniac thing fans of the 2012 remake in particular may have gotten my sort of joke there the original maniac made heavy use of POV shots and the remake just did it the whole dang time but peep show was doing everything fully first person a decade before that and of course that's what distinguished the show then and still does now and probably will forever or at least until we get some sort of VR sitcom where we can jump from person to person and see scenes playing out from everybody's different perspectives it's a very intimate experience and one that feels inherently voyeuristic it's why so many horror movies use it you feel kind of creepy when you are seeing through someone else's eyes and in that sense peep show would probably be weirder if the people whose heads that you spend most of your time in weren't total creeps right and i guess that's a worthwhile trade-off since i really like first person filmmaking and particularly like seeing different ways that it is implemented and peep show is pretty straightforward you know there are no fancy tricks and there's certainly nothing like enter the void which literally adds like a blinking animation to the whole thing but it creates a very different sort of sitcom experience while you will see from the perspective of other people in a scene whether they are like part of the story or just random passerby who offer the opportunity for a more dramatically useful camera angle most of each episode takes place inside the heads of our protagonists and that allows us to hear their respective thoughts on a situation in a way that doesn't require a lot of extra thought even in scenes where it's just the two of them and you're hearing both their dialogue and their thoughts back and forth you're easily able to understand whose perspective you're seeing things from so you never need to think about whose voice you're hearing it's a clever technique and i completely understand why it didn't catch on now i only agreed to watch season one for the purposes of this video but i have continued watching i wanted to see how they would progress after a full season of lessons learned and season two is already far more confident and somehow even more cringe inducing which means it's even slower going but after i pause and do my steam letting ritual i do keep coming back 8.6 out of 10 thank you so much for watching the particularly to my patrons my mom hammer and marco cat cerakata benjamin schiff anthony coal elliot fowler greg lucina cojo phil bates willow i'm the sword riley zimmerman claire bear tale indice andrew madison design and the folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video that's great if not oh well if you want to see more uh suggest what i'll do in three days down below