English comedian and creator of The Office, Ricky Gervais, has taken his popular podcast and brought it to TV.
The Ricky Gervais Show, as it’s now called, is a half-hour animated series on HBO. Just like the podcast, it stars him, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington talking about things. Just like the podcast, this mostly means that it features Ricky and Stephen introducing topics and then Karl waxing insane about them, which prompts them to laugh at him.
That the recently AWOL podcast was returning in any form was extremely exciting to me. I loved the podcast, and I bought the Ricky Gervais Guide to… audiobook series that spun off from it.
The HBO series, however, is a disappointment. And this is because it is basically the exact same thing as the podcast. Which is to say, it’s great to listen to, but not great to watch.
Still, they didn’t mess with the winning formula, which is these three guys talking, and they tried to jazz it up for the visual media by animating it, which allows them to show animations action out the scenarios they discuss (instead of just three animated guys sitting around the microphones).
It’s a valiant attempt, for sure, but regardless, it’s just not fun to watch. Like I just said, the show is almost exactly the same as the podcast–just these three guys (two smart, one insane) sitting around and talking about different topics, which is super interesting–to listen to. But no amount of animating it and acting it out makes this a good visual format for TV.
I understand why they did it–trying to take it to TV is more exposure, more money, surely. A tried and true medium. But unfortunately, what make these guys good to listen to is precisely what makes it dull to watch. And I am left wishing I could just get audio copies of the shows to hook up to my iPod to listen to like the good old days.
