What would happen if you took five unlikeable oddballs and had them work together in an advertising agency? Nobody cares, but the BBC picked up this premise anyway. This show has some funny bits here and there, but these are mostly bits that really go for the easiest, lowest humour there is: funny accents and weird hair, the things that make me laugh and groan at the same time. The dialogues range from rather bland to excruciatingly awful. No ideas, little wit, they're mostly just a pile-up of lame punchlines 102% of the viewers could have come up with. The saving grace of this show are the actors, who do the best they can with their pathetic one-dimensional characters. Especially Simon Farnaby regularly cracks me up as the guy from eastern Europe who mysteriously still has a British name. All he has to do is walk around and be weird, but he squeezes every drop out of that. In one episode he walks around with a bag and steals people's happiness. That's probably the lamest subplot any sitcom has ever had, but Farnaby somehow makes it work. Jarred Christmas is also rather good as the Australian guy who is well, Australian. "The Persuasionists" is by no means a good show, but I occasionally find myself watching it anyway.
