We’ve made it—we’re at Joel Fry’s first episode of W1A! By the time he showed up on Twenty Twelve, he was in most of the rest of the series, but here, his appearances are a little more scattered. Unless things pick up, I’m guessing this is mostly gonna be a “go through the motions between Joel Fry scenes” series.
The BBC gets wind of a forthcoming newspaper article dealing with executive salaries—namely, Ian’s salary, and he’s dismayed to learn that he’s the one who’s supposed to write a statement in support of himself. Lucy has been working with a young writer, Dan, on developing a new dramedy, and the day has come for them to meet with the higher-ups and see if they can get the BBC to move forward with it. Will the intern’s plan to get closer to the PA he has a crush on backfires on him.
Will is our character of the week, played by Hugh Skinner. He’s a pretty quintessential intern character, inattentive and useless. He has a very obvious crush on Izzy, one of the PAs, and in this episode, he jumps at the chance to help her with a tedious but crucial job. Unfortunately for him, it turns out he’s not volunteering to work on this with her. Rather, he’s freeing her up for other tasks she has to get done. Womp womp!
There is some amusing stuff here. I enjoy the humor about the wildly impractical BBC office—in this episode, we see people perching on precariously-high chairs and sitting down to talk on one of the random colorful seesaws(???) in the office. And I feel for Lucy as she tries to get Dan through this painfully circuitous meeting. When one of the higher-ups tells Dan that his script seems “a bit long,” we get this exchange:
LUCY: “I mean, do you want to put a bit of detail on that, Matt?”
MATT: “No, sure.”
LUCY: “Just to help Dan get a sense of, you know, what you mean.”
MATT: “Yeah, no, sure.”
And after he talks entirely out of his ass for a while, she points out that the script he’s holding is actually two episodes. Lucy is definitely giving off “only grownup in the room” vibes, and she’s a person who’s trying to make things happen.
As opposed to most everybody else, who’s largely trying to act as if they know what they’re talking about. About a month in, it’s still not entirely clear what Ian’s job as head of values actually is. And that’s part of the joke, of course, along with part of the reason his high salary is such a sticking point. But he’s far from the only person who takes a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach to busking their way through a meeting.
And while I get that the show is skewering needless bureaucracy—Twenty Twelve did too—it can be really frustrating to watch numerous conversations where no one is actually saying anything. So far, it feels like W1A has even less physical plot to hang onto. Twenty Twelve, on the whole, has the more tangible goal of the Olympics that it’s building towards, although that show gets very recursive by the end as well. With W1A, we’re starting at the level where Twenty Twelve ended, and the whole thing threatens to turn into a big dialogue ouroboros.
The same sort of applies to David Tennant’s narration as well. While he still gets some clever lines, more of his dialogue is feeling repetitive or self-explanatory. Here a couple bits I liked, though:
- “By 10:00 at night, New Broadcasting House is virtually empty, except for those people who are still there” – See what I mean?
- “If it hasn’t exactly been a good day for producer Lucy Freeman, for Ian it’s been worse than good, and it’s about to get worse than bad” – But this is a genuinely fun one!
And then, we have Siobhan and her team. She brought up the idea of refreshing the BBC logo, and now, it’s time for another pitch session. These too are also fairly predictable, although Siobhan’s team is less likely to say nothing than they are to say nonsense, albeit with lots of “likes” thrown in as fillers.
So the team’s BBC logo pitch isn’t dramatically different from their Olympics/Diamond Jubilee collaboration pitch or their women’s football ad campaign pitch. But the important thing is that these scenes—just the one in this episode—give us Karl. Call me a hypocrite, but I don’t mind that the same joke gets hammered over and over again when Joel Fry’s line deliveries and reaction shots are involved.
As usual, Barney and Coco are talking the whole meeting, and whenever Karl tries to speak, he’s either shot down or stared at. His notions are often a little out of step with his colleagues—when Coco is riffing on, “What if the BBC were a fruit?”, imagining what kind of fruit it would be, Karl tries to offer, “Yeah, maybe a kind of cheese.” He also tends to be a bit behind, chiming in right as everyone else comes to the unspoken agreement of, we’re not doing that anymore. There’s a great moment where Barney is talking about how the BBC needs to lose all the letters in its logo to look more like an app, saying, “Yeah, it’s like, it’s not Jane Austen here, guys. Get real. It’s an iPad, get an iCon.” Karl is so pleased with himself for adding, “That’s why we had an iDea,” so much so that he repeats it for emphasis when Barney tries to move on. He’s just darling, and I love him!
Also, look at this man’s shoes and socks! I’m “meh” on W1A, but Karl is as perfect as ever.
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