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Vexed

Vexed was a nice find on Netflix.

I won't say it is a great detective show, I won't say it is the best comedy, and I won't say it is the best British comedy, but I will say it's worth watching because it was the last funny thing to come out of England.

England used to be a place where comedy could be irreverent, where radio programs and television shows poked fun at prevailing pieties.  Current television shows I'm seeing are either so tendentious to be unwatchable, or have an embarrassment-style humor that makes me feel like I'm watching Different Strokes.

Vexed seems to have been written just before the UK went stupid.

It has two seasons of very different character.  Both have the same male lead, Toby Stephens DI Jack Armstrong, a lazy caricature of a chauvinistic detective, and the female lead changes between seasons, but present two different kinds of competent woman.  In the first season the lead is Lucy Punch as DI Kate Bishop, an accomplished inspector from outside the city with marital problems, and in the second season the lead is Miranda Raison as DI Georgina Dixon, a studious new inspector paired up with DI Jack.

The series were produced very differently.  The first one was much more coherent, with three episodes written and directed coherently by the same two people.  The general atmosphere of the show was wonderful, Bishop's hatred of Armstrong being palpable.  DI Jack's ability to bumble into success while Bishop's hard work and dedication went unnoticed would have made the first season awesome.

Except Bishop was married to the Creature, and her violent outbursts where she repeatedly injured him just hit the eye-rolling "she's not really going to do that" humor that is popular in England these days.  That entire island should be emptied and its inhabitants forced to live in a giant trailer park in middle of Western Australia, which is their intellectual home.

The second series was not as funny, but it didn't have the painful lows of the first season.  It had six episodes written and directed by different people.  The chemistry between the leads didn't work as well, especially since at the end of every episode you could feel DI George thinking to herself, "Oh, Jack! Well, boys will be boys."  Making the two detectives get along in that way reduced its fun (for me).

Worse, the shows were written with an Irony Kit (tm).  There's the show where Jack gets a dominant, masculine girlfriend, for example, where George gets a girly man as a beaux.  The whole turning tables thing was overdone by 1970, and it didn't help the show.

But, the second season also lacked the uncomfortableness of the first, which was its only bonus.

So, with reservations, I recommend Vexed.

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