"Don't touch me! I'm full of moisturizer. You might drain it all off. It'd be like rain on the desert -- it'd all get sucked away." - Kate Isitt as Sally to a 92-year-old woman
Coupling: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Steve Taylor (Jack Davenport) and Susan Walker (Sarah Alexander) are two Londoners who have just begun to date. They have only two problems. One is that Steve is deathly afraid of commitment. The other is their group of strange friends. Patrick (Ben Miles) is Susan's ex, a slick rogue who never met a woman he hasn't already bedded. Jane (Gina Bellman) is Steve's ex, a woman so self absorbed that she thinks its okay to date a gay man because she herself is bisexual. Jeff (Richard Coyle) is Steve's best friend who has an oddball word or phrase ("unflushable," "the sock gap," and "the giggle loop," just to name a few) for every aspect of human relations, yet is too emotionally stunted to be in a relationship himself. Rounding out the gang is Susan's best friend, Sally (Kate Isitt), a beautician so vain that she has placed a limit on facial expressions in order to prevent wrinkles.
Coupling is the most well written sitcom on television today. The plotlines are often wildly intricate and always hysterically funny. Steven Moffat, who writes all of the episodes, takes standard sitcom conventions and turns them on their ear. Think back to Three's Company. In any given episode, someone - say Mr. Roper - overhears a conversation, misunderstands the conversation's meaning, and then acts on that misinterpretation. Yucks ensue. Moffat takes this old-as-time conceit and ratchets up the humor by denying each character one key piece of the puzzle. Thus, while they are all interacting with each other, no one is really on the same page. He uses this technique to great effect in episode four, "Inferno," as the characters, sitting around the table at a dinner party gone disastrously wrong, look around and silently communicate their feelings about each other. Each person, lost in his or her own thoughts, completely misinterprets what is going on around the table. This scene is immensely funny, and it involves no dialogue.
Unlike most sitcom creators, Moffat is also unafraid to play with the structure of the show. This is evident in "The Girl with Two Breasts" when a scene suddenly rewinds to its beginning, only to be played out this time around from the viewpoint of its non-English speaking participant. The gifted writer is even able to breathe new life into the old Rashomon "He said/She said" trick.
This fall, the show will be given the "Must See TV" treatment when an Americanized version joins NBC's Thursday night lineup following Will & Grace. Early buzz is that the show will hew closely to the BBC version, even using the same scripts. It will be interesting to see whether or not the creative team will be able to pull this off. At the very least, surely some of the show's complexity will be lost simply due to the fact that with commercials, the American version will be shorter than its BBC counterpart by almost one third.
BBC series also have incredibly short runs. The first season of Coupling, for example, contains only six episodes. Producing only six episodes a year gives Moffat ample time to sharpen his scripts. If the American Coupling succeeds, its first season will include more episodes than the first three seasons of the BBC version combined. We will have to wait and see if the creators can achieve the same high level of quality on this accelerated schedule. Luckily for us, even if NBC's series is a complete bomb, the original version is available on DVD for our viewing enjoyment.
The six episodes that comprise season one are contained on a single disc. The disc is housed in a blue keepcase. The DVD menus look terrific. The main menu presents successive clips from each of the six episodes. From this menu, viewers can play all six episodes or choose to watch an individual one. Choosing an individual episode brings up that episode's dedicated menu. The individual episode menus feature short clips from each of the episode's six chapter stops.
