Extras Season 2: Are ya havin’ a laugh?!
So maybe I should have held off on this post. Maybe I should have waited until mid-February when the second season of Extras, Ricky Gervais’ awesome follow-up to The Office, will come to a close after its six-episode run on HBO. There’s a problem, though. We live in the modern age, and once somethings out there, people are going to find a way to watch it. Extras season two finished its run on BBC 2 (whose site has full episodes that can be viewed for free) in the UK last Thursday. A year ago, Extras ran on HBO weeks, if not a full month, after it ended its BBC run. This year, they’re making us sit around and wait three months. Three months!? To keep reading click below…
The moral of the story is that I went ahead and watched it (you can’t stop the information!), and I’m going to just come out right now and declare it as nothing shy of brilliant. Perhaps the biggest surprise from this season was how the previous six episodes never suggested the show could come close to The Office in terms of bringing the funny, nor do I suspect it wanted to. The Office made Ricky Gervais famous and rich, so how do you follow that up? Extras is the prefect project. It takes much of the same cringe-inducing humor from The Office but places it in the polished world of film and television and surrounded the whole thing with A-List movie stars. It also seemed purposefully understated, and yet this year Extras was easily as good as the formally untouchable series. Maybe better.
This time around, the whole show seems laser-beam focused in what it wants to do. Andy Millman (Gervais) starts the season working on his new workplace sitcom, “When the Whistle Blows” and quickly goes from comedy-auteur to comedy-hack when producers have him tone down the show and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator (which it does and which get it huge, huge, huge ratings). The series then follows Andy’s battle with becoming a sell-out versus enjoying his new celebrity. And of course along the way many real celebrities come in and out of the story (including, but not limited to: Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Daniel Radcliffe, Chris Martin and Sir Ian McKellen) all saying the most asinine lines one could possibly imagine (provided, conveniently enough by the pen of Gervais and his writing partner Stephen Merchant, who plays his idiot agent on the show).
Also interesting is that we’re led to believe Gervais won’t be producing any more episodes of Extras after this second season (maybe there will be a special like what they did with The Office), which I like. I love that he can just walk away from a success when he’s on top. It also made me think that it’d be interesting to have a creator (say Gervais) produce “mini-series” for American television under a specific umbrella. In the US, television companies don’t want limited run series, they want longevity, because longevity translates to syndication, which turns into swimming pools full of money. But what if you could have many short series all with the same title? People would tune in because they’d know what kind of a show they’d see, but every six weeks would be presented with a whole new set of characters — it might work even better if each series had the same principle actors. Kind of a theatre company on television. Hell, I’d watch it, but then again, I’d watch almost anything.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, unless of course you’re a high-powered television producer, in which case CALL ME!
Extras season two will start airing on HBO this January. Mark your calendars.
Tags: BBC
October 25th, 2006 at 2:31 am
You’ve already got my attention with your screenshot of Daniel Radcliffe dressed as a boy scout making interesting hand gestures. Gotta see this show.