A thread for 'The Thick Of It' (and 'In The Loop' as well)

really? the Glen and Ollie combo is pure gold. then there's Jamie, Julius... really there's no one on the other side anywhere near as good as that. Peter Mannion and Emma Messenger are good (and excellent actors) but Vincent Franklin is pretty characateur-ish as well as pretty badly played imo.

i mean he's not terrible but everyone else is so good that it kinda shows him up. and i'd guess he's pretty much the main character now.

More likely to be about Peter Mannion than Vincent Frankin's character, who I agree is relatively weak. PHIL is amazing though, although mostly as a foil for Ollie.

that andrew rawnsley interview with armando the other do was crazy. armando being all calm and sensible, rawnsley being a concern trolling herb.

Great series opener.

i thought it was quite bad, the writing was poor: just a series of one-liners in place of any kind of substance. a couple of good one-liners admittedly but not bedded into a believable scenario. the direction was poor as well, a load of actors who didn't seem to know what they were supposed to be doing. i don't thing this is the directors fault though.

i know dosac is supposed to be some lolworthy non-department but i just didn't believe the scenario with the apps and then i didn't believe the fake furore with the minister going home with his half bottle of champagne. it was flimsy.

also it was annoying that they did that )re in the loop) thing of re-using an actor from a previous episode in a completely different role. one of the actors (i dunno who since i couldn't actually tell who anyone was supposed to be) was previously used as the newspaper editor in spinners and losers. the one who was trying to get ollie's ex gf to get ollie to dish the dirt so that he could have a headline for the morning's paper.

the glorious confusion of the rise of the nutters/spinners and losers episodes worked because the central characters were already bedded in. you can't really use that format on new characters who we know nothing about. no amount of one-liners and frantic camera moves can substitute for that.

overall this was a lot like veep.

rubbish, this was great. I especially liked the casual nazi references from several tories,

this was fucking waste

only writer credited was will smith the prick who plays the conservative apparatchik

idk if this is iannucci making a bbc1 sitcom episode as oblique condemnation of coalition era cultural degredation, or he really doesn't give a fuck anymore now he's running tings for HBO

credit to roger allam to putting in a good shift in a failing enterprise

to/for

i thought it was alright but i just watched the last series opener this morning and its a lot tighter

but that's one disruptive presence in a scenario we already know, which is kind of a fun thing to write and a delight to watch executed well -- whereas this is 'let's try and make round characters out of these people we're used to just seeing one facet of' which is a lot more work on both sides

i don't know, it seems like they're going all in on this having a continuous plot rather than being episodic? so i am okay with the idea it might take a minute to get off the ground

It was a bit light on incident for a TTOI episode, but I still laughed a lot. Love Mannion and Phil.

felt sorry for the actors playing terri and glenn

well Terri had to deliver the superficially funny lines

"Ever the charmless minor royal." & (to Glen) "You look like a week-old party balloon. I just don't want you ending up as one of those 'before he turned the gun on himself' guys."

which, you know, may be funny but even if you do think they're funny it's not Terri, that's not her character. that's just trying to write every character like a variation on malcolm tucker. there were worse examples eg. Mannion calling Terri a fart in a frock we what to waft out of here. which definitely isn't funny OR in character.

It's not funny, but it is in character for Mannion. I basically agree with you on inserting mini-Tuckerisms into the mouth of any character who happens to be standing about at the time, but TTOI has been doing that for ages - Terri and (especially) Glen have had loads of those jarring one-liners in the past.

lol at calling stuart "doctor robotnik"

Actually the one-liners seemed particularly jarring coming from the new LibDems.

the glorious confusion of the rise of the nutters/spinners and losers episodes worked because the central characters were already bedded in

The central characters in this episode have been bedded in for ages, they were hardly introducing an entire cast at once.

Thought the episode was very funny but flawed. The LibDems were a bit clumsily handled - the guy playing the MP had the mix of petulant impotence down nicely and obviously they're necessary in this series, but the episode as a whole fell victim to the modern malaise of trying to include too much stuff at once.

The main Tories were all excellent and Roger Allam was more than good enough to carry the episode in his own right. The scene where he was dying in front of the 6th form IT class was hilarious and excruciating. Glen having defected to the LibDems made sense as well.

I like Stuart as a character but, I dunno, Ianucci should really have taken a second look at his collection of Tories because real life has overtaken him madly. You can give Mannion a pass as some kind of avuncular and marginalised Ken Clarke type but if the episode was missing anything it was a properly evil Tory bastard to rival Malcolm Tucker. The lack of an Andy Coulson figure so far feels like a missed opportunity. The gag about Stuart taking a morning off after Steve Jobs died was pitch perfect though.

Splitting the two sides like this is a bit odd, I have faith the thing will improve massively when they move over to the opposition and then set the two groups up against each other.

i know dosac is supposed to be some lolworthy non-department but i just didn't believe the scenario with the apps

I just about bought this because a) it's not that much more convoluted and stupid than some actual government policies and b) if Dosac actually existed it would have been cut in its entirety, the only conceivable reason for it existing would be to put some kind of liberal gloss on brutal Tory policies, which I suppose is going to be the theme for the series.

You can give Mannion a pass as some kind of avuncular and marginalised Ken Clarke type but if the episode was missing anything it was a properly evil Tory bastard to rival Malcolm Tucker.

the only precedent here is tom hollander's cameo as an estuarine coulson type at the end of the last series, but hollander has his work cut out being hollywood's favourite undersized englishman (so i guess he will turn up in a cameo on veep s2 as the british ambassador or something)

yeah i did spend a little while thinking 'whatever happened to 'the fucker''

2013    Untitled Woody Allen Project               Undersized English Chap

Yeah I was assuming Hollander just wasn't available, they need someone though, there's no way the Stuart guy would have lasted into a real Tory government (and maybe he won't).

the real version is on sabbatical at stanford iirc

there isn't actually any need for most of the characters now that the writing is basically 'offscreen character x is a bloody old bastard' x1000

jed p much otm, here, though i wasn't quite as despairing. it did have an awkward 'radio play' feel to it, though, the direction fairly staid & the sorta framing & acting of fergus & the other guy p poor.

also it was annoying that they did that )re in the loop) thing of re-using an actor from a previous episode in a completely different role. one of the actors (i dunno who since i couldn't actually tell who anyone was supposed to be) was previously used as the newspaper editor in spinners and losers. the one who was trying to get ollie's ex gf to get ollie to dish the dirt so that he could have a headline for the morning's paper.

this is way off though! the guy was previously the night shift editor of the independent - afaic this seems like a fairly salient take on the small village quality of westminster, that he's pointedly resurfacing.

this def underperformed though. i feel like w/this being the final series there's actually some room for some real weight to it, in the same way that there was with in the loop, which was way more affecting & depressing than it was amusing, leaving you with questions about politics. having the opposition involved next week is kinda promising. but yeah mannion didn't quite flesh out, & there were a lot of kinda veep-level weak lines (i wish there was an app that could send him a dead cat, &c).

i loved it when terri stood up for herself. even if it was a calculated move to get herself fired.

more like episode two of the last series, actually, nicola snookering herself into pitching a policy on wooden toys

Glen having defected to the LibDems made sense as well.

yes this was great, both that it made sense for him to have done it, and the horrible clash between it having re-energised him and made him care and try to be involved, and his entire new world treating him like Ollie did

also just having Mannion as the lead was so delightful I glossed over the clunkiest lines.

BTW anyone in the US may want to note that this is available on hulu as are all previous series.
(also appears to be a hulu co-production this series)

"this is way off though! the guy was previously the night shift editor of the independent - afaic this seems like a fairly salient take on the small village quality of westminster, that he's pointedly resurfacing"

he's the same character?

well it seems so. same actor same character name. it doesn't make it any more believable to me though.

ps i wasn't despairing about it though, i just didn't think it was any good.

sure. btw the n-bomb & the rape joke really kinda stood out in this, both v graceless aside from being like ... a rape joke, &c. (that said, that there was an implied osbournian chancellor was neat).

Glen is going to get an astonishing savaging when he and Malcolm finally come into contact with one.another.

yeah it felt like a weak start, didn't really like the back & forth between the 2 new guys that glen was following around. it did pick up about halfway through, the app presentation to the classroom made me laugh cuz lol technology

Yeah the LibDems feel like the weak link. The Thick of It up until now has not even bothered to acknowledge that the LibDems even exist, now it feels like they're there just because they have to be. The Liberal spin doctor didn't seem to have any distinguishing character traits at all.

the guardian review was one of those articles they publish that seem like 200 concatenated tweets

but i did think the "too many characters" point was fair. can't really see a way round that in the coalition era tho.

The Liberal spin doctor didn't seem to have any distinguishing character traits at all.

That may be the point

yes let's make a sitcom about how boring the uk political class is and we will achieve this by making all the characters completely indistinguishable

That was fucking great,

do u think there's any chance they'll have an increasingly irrelevant Tucker become all faux-earnest and bleeding heart, all being chummy w/ lefty/gin/tea middle class twitter and being publicly worried about Stiliyan Petrov's cancer

no not really

next week's looks like fun

this is kind of more like the first series in some ways, than the last series

this is what happens when they don't let some wasteman write it

Definitely need to form a band called Quiet Batpeople.

Also Tinker Taylor Soldier Cunt.

i like malcolm's glasses. having the other member of shadcab be receptive enough to suss out his agenda is a neat move, too.

do u think there's any chance they'll have an increasingly irrelevant Tucker become all faux-earnest and bleeding heart

i think i said this last week but i hope there is some sorta earnest-teachable-moment vibe to the end of this season (it's the last/barring specials, according to ianucci, fwiw) - it's strong & realistic enough to hold weight and actually comment on the directions of politics, i hope it kinda ventures into that territory a little, a la in the loop.

his description of star wars was amazing