It is with no pleasure at all to report that Armando Iannucci’s new show for HBO, Avenue 5, is not good (at least, according to the pilot). Iannucci, my favourite living screenwriter and showrunner/creator/producer/director (I’m Alan Partridge (and various other Alan Partridge shows), The Thick Of It, In The Loop, The Death of Stalin, Veep, and the upcoming The Personal History of David Copperfield). Iannucci has brought some of his long-standing writing and producing crew, including Tony Roche, Will Smith, Ian Martin, Georgia Pritchett, Sean Grey and Simon Blackwell along with him to this new venture; together, these are The Beatles of TV comedy, as astonishingly consistently brilliant group. Let’s call them The Iannuccis. But all artists are fallible, and something happened here.
Political satire has been The Iannuccis’ stock in trade, and they’re at their most dextrous when manoeuvring a group of three to seven nincompoops around a farcically inane situation. Here, they’ve substituted recognisable corridors of power – British Parliament, the White House – for those of a luxury starship cruise liner, led by Iannuccis all-star Hugh Laurie as a witless captain (there’s a twist to that which I won’t spoil). When a galactic incident occurs, the starship is propelled into a new trajectory, stranding the passengers and crew together for three years.
It’s hard to define exactly what went wrong, but something really did, because the show fails, landing its gags with a dead thud. The huge cast – rather than tight groups, we’re deliberately dealing with a lot of passengers – weighs the comedy’s mechanics down; the contrived setting jettisons The Iannuccis ability to deploy satire; mainly, though, the characters who form the key ensemble within the starship just aren’t well conceived. This means we’re stuck with them, drastically reducing the chances of the show ‘finding itself’, at least this season.
Too much money, too much carte blanche, too long working together, too complacent in their brilliance, too much on their plate(s)? Impossible to say. What is clear is that the cast – some individually talented – are clearly trying to play in The Iannuccis style; they’ve watched Veep and they’re doing Veep, and with this many of them, it’s all too much, too loud, too unfocused, and unfunny.
Oh well.