*A spoiler from the pilot.*
Oh my god! Loooove this episode! Fantastic plot for Darren/Joel Fry, which is of course wonderful to see. But it’s also just so solid as a whole, a terrific farce where the characters are getting shuffled around like a shell game.
Darren wakes up hungover in a woman’s bed. As he’s attempting to sneak out, he runs straight into Ollie at the front door: the woman is their client. She doesn’t know Darren’s a handyman, and Ollie doesn’t know he slept with her. As Darren badly tries to juggle all of this, Ollie starts getting complications to juggle too: Tony is insistent that Ollie places a bet for him at the bookie’s, and Emma may have found an investor for Ollie’s restaurant idea, but the pitch absolutely has to happen today.
So, so, so good! The three main plots—Darren’s one-night-stand, Tony’s bet, and Emma’s investor—all jumble together and interact in a hilarious comedy of errors, and all the drama and hijinks somehow find their way to the client’s house, where Ollie and Darren are supposed to be putting up a fireplace. I’m honestly so impressed. For a show whose pilot felt very average to me, each episode just seems to get better and better. This one displays a steady hand for comic farce, upping the stakes higher and higher as we wait to see who will get away with their gambits and whose will blow up in their faces.
In addition to the well-executed tightrope of a plot, there are so many great little comedic details. I especially love a bit about whether a handyman can use the phrase “another day at the office,” Ollie trying to explain to Tony what a private call is, and the reveal that Ollie’s full name is Oliver Josh Curry—“me dad wanted to call me Rogan.” Hee!
Back in the pilot, we learned that Ollie and Emma met in catering college. They never dated, but Ollie was into her, and after he was kicked out of the program, he wound up taking over the handyman business while Emma has gone on to open her own restaurant…based on one of Ollie’s ideas. Now, though, the restaurant is floundering, and her investor is ready to pull out. Emma frantically pitches him a few ideas of her own before blurting out another idea of Ollie’s. It’s to her credit that she at least tells him about this one and offers to go in on it together—that said, it’s at least partly because she only has a handful of hours to prepare for a full pitch and needs Ollie’s business plan. It’s interesting to see Emma in more scenes outside of Ollie, and it’s also good to see her getting into a mess of her own. So far, she’s mostly been shown as polished and successful, despite regularly taking advantage of Ollie’s pushover nature/affection for her. While Ollie always finds himself in some sort of trouble, Emma looks put-together by comparison, so I like seeing her having to scramble here along with the rest of the characters.
And then there’s Darren. Joel Fry is sooooo funny in his episode—he honestly had me cackling at multiple points. Right from the start, we get some good physicality, with Darren struggling to get dressed while bleary and hungover, then awkwardly carrying his shoes as he follows Ollie back through the client’s house, pretending he just arrived early for the job.
He’s now stuck, with Ollie wondering why the client is offering Darren brunch and the one-night-stand wondering why Darren keeps getting up to “help” Ollie. “I’m just being nice,” he tells her with a please-buy-it grin. What’s more, Darren can’t remember the woman’s name or what profession he’d made up for himself to impress her. When he discovers that the job schedule only lists her first initial and last name, he says to himself, “Bollocks! Er, Louise? Liz? No, that’s my sister’s name.”
Just like this episode shows us a different perspective on Emma, we’re treated to a different view on Darren as well. We’ve already seen several ways that he’s more than just the horny slacker sidekick, but for much of Darren’s screentime on the show so far, he’s been pretty consistently chill. When the whacky mishaps are happening around him, he’s the one to offer deadpan commentary, drowsily wonder why everyone is getting so worked up, or be blithely oblivious to it all. In this episode, however, Darren’s the one trying to manage a huge mishap, and it’s so much fun to watch him try to navigate that. He’s weird and twitchy and has this air of forced cheerfulness to cover up his internal freakout. Fry plays all of this to a tee. He has a talent for being really funny in such an understated way, and here, he gives us Darren flailing without ever feeling like he’s going too broad.
One last bit I want to mention. There’s a scene where Ollie and Darren have a conversation about looks, and after Darren calls himself a 9, Ollie laughs and says, “You’re a low 7 at best.” Darren jokes back, “Oh, thought about it, have you?”, and the two of them go back and forth about it for a bit. What I like about this is that none of the jokes here rely on homophobia. When Ollie argues that he hasn’t spent time ranking Darren’s looks, he doesn’t bring a no homo attitude to it, and Darren doesn’t mock Ollie by calling him gay—instead, he playfully chides Ollie for his unprofessionalism, “checking me out while I’m supposed to be doing my job.” It shouldn’t have to be noteworthy that a sitcom from 2011 didn’t go for low-hanging gay jokes, but I braced myself a little when this exchange began and was pleased with how it shakes out.
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