Extras Series 2 - Review
Gervais and Merchant Return For Second Season of TV and Film Satire
A review of the second series of extras, the sitcom by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Andy Millman's sitcom is produced, and Maggie continues to work as an extra.
In The Simpsons episode ‘Bart Gets Famous’, 10-year-old Bart, already disillusioned with the show-business world that he finds himself embroiled in, delivers his patented line "I didn’t do it" to a studio audience only to be rebuffed with a muted response. Extras co-writer, director and star Ricky Gervais has since penned an episode of the American cartoon, but the penultimate episode of the second series of his new programme seemed to draw an even closer link between the two shows.
At the dramatic climax of the episode, Gervais’ character Andy Millman, having been cast in a lead role in Sir Ian McKellen’s play ‘A Month Of Summers’, is clearly uncomfortable at having to perform a gay kiss and ruins the play by refusing his on-stage co-star’s advances, before explaining to the audience that he was uncomfortable with the scene. Millman proceeds in characteristically painstaking fashion to bemoan having been forced into the scene, and when he realises no sympathy is forthcoming from the shocked audience, delivers the catchphrase "are you having a laugh, is he having a laugh?", from the moderately-at-best received sitcom Millman himself wrote and starred in, ‘When the Whistle Blows’, in a desperate bid for a reprieve.
When the audience reacts unfavourably, Andy retorts that they are "not my audience", but the first episode of the series had spelled out unmistakably that the audience he is referring to is not his audience either, when he panned wistfully across the Little Britain-t-shirt-clad crowd gathered at the pilot of his sitcom whilst in the midst of trying to cull the catchphrase from the show.
David Brent, the character that Gervais played in the Extras predecessor The Office, appears, perhaps unintentionally, to have been given something of a resurrection in McKellen’s episode. Brent and Millman always shared certain characteristics, most notably their panache for poor handling of social situations, but Andy’s on-stage post-mortem of his latest disaster seems to hark back to Brent’s ill-fated career as a TV personality appearing in nightclubs as a D-list celebrity.
Then, Brent managed to make a mess of a Blind Date style game show, eventually labelled with an expletive by an audience member, before losing his temper backstage in a performance clouded with the disillusionment shown by Bart Simpson and Andy Millman.
When Gervais and Merchant first appeared on British television, it was the manner in which their protestations of brilliance came across as not entirely sarcastic that made them stand out. But now, with their talent undeniable, are they co-starring with Robert De Niro simply because they can, or are they still uncertain enough about their own audience to feel a need to cast Robert De Niro to pull in viewers?
