elbiggus

The original J&SB movie was flawed but entertaining, but this is... well, it's awful. It acts like it's a satire of reboots, but there's a difference between satirising something and actually just being the thing, and this is firmly the latter. The jokes are weak, the acting is weaker, the cameos feel strained beyond breaking point, and the whole thing is painful to watch. No idea what happened to Kevin Smith, but he shouldn't be allowed to make movies any more; he's made a couple of genuine classics, a couple of near misses, and a whole pile of steaming stinkers, and this particular dropping is the crowning glory. Heck, it's even worse than Jersey Girl.

I'm sure video game-based TV used to be good (or at the very least watchable) but it seems as the medium has advanced, TV's ability to do something good with it has all but vanished and this panel-show-cum- car-crash perhaps marks a new record low.

The format is similar to The Generation Game, but messy or complex activities that have scope for comical failures have been replaced with video game-related challenges so instead of watching some unwitting member of the public performing some highly-skilled task with no preparation with the potential for emergent slapstick comedy we get to watch a celebrity playing a game. Sometimes they're OK at it, sometimes they're not, but the result is either dull or annoying -- there are no impressive skills to marvel at, and there are no comic consequences of failure.

The resident team captains seem to have little or no experience with or connection to games and their purpose on the show is somewhat unclear, the audience voting does nothing but pad the running time, the host/co-host banter is painfully unfunny, and the fact that everyone involved seems to pander to the "games players are generally sad and pathetic loners" is just the rancid icing on the stale cake.

It's a shame, really, as Dara O'Briain is usually pretty funny and from his appearances on other shows he also seems to be a bit of a gamer so I was hoping for something worthwhile, but alas it was not to be. Stick on some old episodes of Bad Influence! or Gamesmaster, or re-watch Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe instead...

On paper this sounds like a fairly run of the mill proposition -- take a mismatched group of misfits at a chaotic community college, and highjinks ensue -- but by playing with genre tropes it elevates itself well beyond the ordinary, and is perhaps one of the funniest sitcoms I've seen in many years. While the principal characters have an element of two dimensionality -- "the cool one", "the repressed one", "the weird geek", "the dumb jock", etc. -- they're brilliantly written and avoid becoming clichés, and the humour treads a broad path from simple slapstick and farce to a complex and almost surreal postmodern self-deconstruction: this is a sitcom that acknowledges it's a sitcom.

The ensemble cast work brilliantly together, the supporting and recurring characters are well used, and the script is consistently funny; it even manages a reboot of sorts in season 5, retaining the same cast but modifying the premise sufficiently to avoid becoming tired.