"I keep going to other people's weddings. I'm getting more and more single. If one more friend gets married, I'll be a lesbian. Did you know your nose keeps growing all your life? If I don't get married soon, they're going to have to cut a hole in the veil." - Kate Isitt as Sally
Coupling: The Complete Second Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Pity the poor Coupling fan. It is a natural tendency for a show's fans to try to convince their friends and family that they, too, need to watch their favorite show. Trying to convert a friend to the cult of Coupling, however, might be a losing battle. First off, the series is British, which will, rightly or wrongly, brand the viewer a nerd. It only plays on BBC America, a cable channel that as of yet is not widespread, and on a handful of PBS stations. And, even worse, the much-hyped Americanized version famously crashed and burned as part of NBC's Thursday night "Must-see" lineup in the fall of 2003. Surely any of the uninitiated who caught the horribly miscast and misguided NBC version in its mercifully brief run will believe that the fans of that original must be crazy - how could something they claim to be so good lead to something so bad?
Luckily, those of us in the know can purchase Coupling: The Complete Second Season and enjoy its clever writing, immensely likeable cast, and copious extras to our heart's content. Season two's continuing adventures of a daft group of Brit friends and lovers in many ways tops the strong-in-its-own-right season one. This is because while the shows are just as funny and the farcical plots just as intricate, season two moves beyond simply relying on sex jokes and instead mines laughs from the characters' ever increasingly complicated interpersonal relationships.
In this season, for example, the no-longer-new couple of Steve (Jack Davenport) and Susan (Sarah Alexander) face questions of where their relationship is headed, especially after they are invited to the wedding of a couple who started dating after they did. Aging obsessed Sally (Kate Isitt) and self-absorbed serial dater Patrick (Ben Miles) experiment with whether or not they are compatible as a couple. Loveable loser Jeff (Richard Coyle) stops dating his right hand long enough to begin dating his boss. Dizzy Jane (Gina Bellman) considers a new career opportunity with the help of her split personality, a brutally honest sock puppet. Of course even amidst all of this personal growth there is still a generous helping of dildo, penis, and breast jokes.
The situations in this season are always funny, as when Jeff gets a date with a beautiful woman he meets on the train by convincing her that he has a wooden leg, or when Patrick breaks up with a girlfriend via her answering machine but goes to great lengths to take the message back when she agrees to a threesome. Several of the episodes transcend into the realm of excruciatingly funny classics, including "My Dinner in Hell" (where a BBC documentary about the masturbatory habits of wild animals ruins Steve's life) and "Dressed" (where Jane makes an extremely poor clothing choice when invited to a dinner party).
Writer/Creator Steven Moffat outdoes himself with "The End of the Line," the final episode of the season. Students of television writing should watch this episode for an example of perfect use of the sitcom form. Not only does this episode contain an abundance of laughs, it also expertly plays with sitcom structure (we see three different segments that are simultaneously independent and interconnected, with their clever interconnection apparent only as each subsequent segment plays out) and ends with perhaps the most devastating concise and symmetrically perfect sequence of dialogue ever employed in a sitcom - two simple, four word sentences that bring the episode, and, in a way, the entire season, full circle...which is a very highfalutin' way of saying "Watch this show!"
NBC's stab at Coupling was considered such a sure thing that a sticker on Coupling: The Complete Second Season proclaims "The original UK version of the SMASH NBC hit!" even though the DVD came out the very week the US version was cancelled, thus tainting a perfectly good DVD with the stench of failure. There is, of course, an easy solution: Get Coupling: The Complete Second Season (being careful not to touch the offending sticker), rip off the wrapper, and toss both the wrapper and the sticker in the garbage. Now close your eyes, tell yourself that the American Coupling was simply a bad dream, and pop one of theses DVDs into your player to enjoy the brilliant original. Be sure to open your eyes first.
The nine episodes that comprise season two are divided onto two discs. The discs are housed in a bright green keepcase that contains an interior swinging arm for the second disc. The DVD menus are in the same style as those for The Complete First Season. The main menu presents successive clips from each of the disc's episodes. From this menu, viewers can play all 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. The only flaw is a noticeable lag when jumping from the main menu to an individual episode menu.
