The one hundred and fourty-ninth TV show: #328 The Young Ones

I've had the DVDs of this show around for a long time, waiting to unleash them for this blog. With it having been a decade since I watched the series, it was interesting to revisit and see how it holds up. Looking at it, it's not the highest of humour, and the first two episodes is mostly the characters being mean and violent to each other, without much more going on. It gets better later, as that tones down in favour of more absurdist plots, surrounded with loads of slapstick violence and at times terrible jokes. It's the weird cutaways and out of nowhere jokes that work best, with the slapstick violence working best when focused and smaller - in particular when it starts making fun of its own tendency to do so in the later episodes.

The second season seems to have had a budget increase, used for longer and bigger cutaways, including hiring an elephant or two, and a bunch more fourth wall breaking gags (including one where Neil's parents comment on him starring in this terrible show). There's still a lot of commitment to the characters, four losers and stereotypes of the groups of students that seem to have been prevalent in the eighties, but the show moves beyond them more often. It's not the most amazingly clever comedy, but as the 1980s equivalent of slapstick comedy, with its aggressive attitude and criticism of the attitudes at the time, is still pretty good. You just need to get past those first few bad episodes.