Mammals

Assuming many won't watch it because of the lead actor but this is actually quite an enjoyable and entertaining series for a Sunday afternoon in front of the TV.

It's begins with a nice story about to unfold and then bang how it can flip, then slap you in the face before giving you that one final massive and fully deserved kick in the arse .!

What ever about his kak chat show .. James Corden gives a good go in this as the lead and the Tom Jones cameo very well placed in episode one.

Difficult to see how a second series would be warranted but if there is one I am sure I'll give it a watch....

...from a totally illogical dislike of James Corden. I have no idea why. And it's been going on a long time. Long before he sort of proved me right becoming all ffar too americanny and then with the omelette incident. I've never seen Gavin and Stacey so I have no idea what he was like in that. I just saw clips of car pool karaoke and things like that which made me want to kick my TV screen in. However, he is excellent in this, as is everyone. Melia Kreiling was wonderful in Tyrant and she is equally good in this and sorry, but i have to say, she is truly beautiful to the point of taking ones breath away. I love the storyline, the Coco Chanel thread which is bonkers but works and whoever chose the music throughout has to be greatly commended. This show is really DIFFERENT and it works. I get the feeling it is what Gervais was aiming for with afterlife - the feeling, not the story - and this shows how badly he missed after series one. I put off watching this due to my Cordenophobia - I heartily reccomend you do not do the same as you will be missing a treat.

Until I watched Mammals and read the references to James Corden, I'd never heard of him. I still don't know much so this review is based only on the show, nothing else.

The story is nothing special, boy-meets-girl, fall in love and then out of love (will they get back together?), but the low-key presentation and somewhat laconic humour make it mildly amusing. Corden's strength in Mammals is not humour though, but a searing, almost child-like, emotional honesty. This is more interesting than the somewhat 'modern' reliance on bathos (think The Office, or Fleabag). A lot of what passes for humour here is bathetic, but if comedy is the art of saying something serious in an amusing way, then there is enough here to entertain.

Where it falls down, and quite hard, is the meandering fantasy of one of the characters that doesn't seem to serve any purpose in the story arc.

No one comes out of this particularly well, and I was left a bit deflated and wondering why Mammals had been presented this way (the advertising photo is utterly meaningless). It's okay, but there is much better out there.

...obviously so did some other people making a futile attempt to review the series. It's quite interesting, and even ironic when observing how so many of us miss the point, getting caught up in the dissolution that things must be as they are presented in form, genera, concepts and even trivial things as our subjective opinion about the actors. I was very surprised by all the negative reviews, so I decided to give a shot at balancing it out with a more objective approach. I'm still in the process of wrapping my head around the dreamlike storytelling and symbolical nature of the series, but I believe we're dealing with a profound and deeply important problem that is rooted within our collective consciousness and culture. I really love the way they address this in an almost mythological manner, and delighted by all the hints that this is something far beyond a trivial comedy surprised . On the contrary, it's touching something way way deeper than we would like to admit, and I think this is intentionally made to make us feel uncomfortable. It's really brilliant when you start to get the the idea, and the biggest clue for me, was when, and in the context Amandine mentioned Albert Camus, and of course the whale and Moby-Dick references.

PS: my native language is Norwegian, and I apologize for any misspelling and bad formulations.

Well I was decently gripped from start to end and I wanted to finish the whole series in one session. Nice and short at just 30 mins a piece so not a hard task. The acting was slightly over the top by Cordon but Hawkins was standout and the fantastical side plot drew me in.

The locations and cinematography were great, it shot the beautiful aspect of cities and countryside.

There seems to be a lot of negative reviews and I was almost put off watching this pretty decent series based on these however I am glad I flicked it on the box last night. Definitely worth a watch, even for a non James Cordon fan.