Remaking a British sitcom can be a dangerous exercise. For every success, there are many, many more failures. So while the U.S. version of The Office has enjoyed years of success, the likes of Coupling and Free Agents have failed in their first season, while Red Dwarf and Spaced didn’t even make it beyond the pilot stage.
So it’s with some trepidation that one approaches The Inbetweeners, MTV’s remake of the British sitcom of the same name, which spawned three hugely successful series and a low-budget spin-off movie that grossed tens of millions at the U.K. box office.
In response to such success, MTV has taken an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach to the show, appropriating the same characters, situations and in many instances jokes and simply transplanting them to America.
And if the below trailer was anything to go by, it was set to be a disaster; a louder and more obnoxious carbon copy of the Channel 4 show. But trailers can be misleading, and so it is with The Inbetweeners, a comedy cover that, while not the equal of the original, nevertheless regularly delivers laughs.
As with the U.K. version, proceedings kick off with teenager Will (Joey Pollari) being transferred to public school Grove High because his mother can no longer pay his private school fees. Showing up with a blazer and briefcase, Will is a walking, talking target to the rest of the kids, so the vice-principal quickly pairs him with nice-guy Simon (Bubba Smith) to show him around.
And that’s where the fun begins, as Simon and best friends Jay (Zack Pearlman) and Neil (Mark L. Young) initially rip the living piss out of Will before eventually taking him under their wing, the three mismatched friends soon becoming four.
They share the same traits as their UK counterparts; Will awkward and uptight, Neil dumb as a rock, Jay a compulsive liar and Simon a wet blanket who’s obsessed with childhood sweetheart Carly D’Amato.
And once the first half of the U.S. pilot has mined the first half of the U.K. pilot for jokes (Will’s mum being hot, Neil’s dad being gay, Jay claiming to have stuffed both his penis and balls into a girl) it then cribs from a different episode in which the boys bunk off school, buy booze, get dunk, and visit Carly’s house, with predictably disastrous results.
Joey Pollari as Will, Mark L. Young as Neil, Zack Pearlman as Jay and Bubba Lewis as Simon.
Yet while the proceedings are caked in the stench of déjà vu, the episode is nevertheless consistently funny, the old jokes just about hitting their mark second time around, and the new ones laugh-out-loud funny, most notably a marvellous set-up and pay-off involving a child molester.
The show also manages to be just as rude, if not ruder that the original (you actually see Simon’s boner in this one, albeit through his trousers) though it’s a shame that the more explicit swear words are bleeped out, and we wait with baited breath for the American equivalent of the word ‘clunge.’
And after a somewhat shaky start, the cast quickly settle into their roles, though their delivery apes the British performances a little too closely, with none of the lads yet the comic equal of the originals, most notably Zack Pearlman as a less cruel and therefore less funny version of Jay.
With the U.S. series following the template of The Office by interspersing U.K.-inspired scripts with original episodes throughout the first season however, it looks like the American cast will soon get the chance to flex their own comedic muscles in new settings and situations.
But on this early evidence, MTV’s The Inbetweeners is much better than it has any right to be, never quite hitting the hilarious highs of the original, but delivering just enough laughs to make the Transatlantic journey worthwhile.
Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN and definitely doesn't look like Will from the British Inbetweeners. His idle chit-chat can be found on both Twitter and MyIGN.
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