I had this series sitting for quite a while after it finished on television and being honest it didn't appeal to me to start it despite generally liking the mix of comedy and the tragic that Gervais can deliver. I'd heard mixed things but based on the clips I'd seen it looked like it was going to be funny enough to do the job. The series focuses on Warwick Davis, playing a version of himself like all the other famous faces in the cast. He is getting divorced, not working much but yet full of a sense of his own importance, normally saying the wrong thing, being pompous or arrogant; so basically the same sort of character that Gervais has done before.
I don't really have a problem with this because with David Brent, Gervais made this work by being at once painfully funny but also having a humanity inside the character so that this would often come through from under the façade. Unfortunately with Life's Too Short there isn't anything like this and the whole piece pretty much is Davis being this way with little else of interest outside of the next dumb thing he is going to do. This affects the plotting quite badly because I have to say I wasn't really interested in the character or the situations and it left the show feeling like just a collection of bits, like a sketch show.
Viewing it as a sketch show is probably best because there are actually some very funny moments and I did laugh several times per episode. The morbid and the off-the-wall stuff works best and there are loads of great lines and scenes. What doesn't work is the frequent humour at the expense of Davis' height – the show was publicised with lots of comments about it not being cruel or mocking but it is hard to get away from the feeling that a lot of it actually is. Whether falling out of cars, being unable to reach things and so on, there is a lot of stuff that is purely laughing at him because of his size and very little of it is actually funny. The celebrity cameos are a mixed bag too; some of them work really well but some of them don't have particularly good material. That there are so many of them is distracting as well, and it does eventually feel like a parade of Gervais' mates – which is also added to by the fact that Merchant and Gervais themselves feel like unnecessary characters who only exist as an easy device to get some way to have the celeb cameos within the flow of the narrative.
Davis himself is pretty good and would have benefited from more opportunity to have given more pathos and pain rather than yet another scene of him falling over or climbing something; I also didn't like the feeling that he was constantly just giving an impression of Gervais, since the character's personality is one he would deliver. Brody is amusing as his accountant but Hanson is far too obvious as the dopey assistant while Enright is just too bland as the ex-wife. Gervais and Merchant are OK in their roles and the celebs mostly are OK, but all of them deserved to have more to work with.
Life's Too Short isn't particularly bad and it does have plenty of funny moments spread across the episodes, but it does play like a sketch show rather than something with flow and meaning behind it. The pathos and humanity is absent and too much of the comedy is rather basic cruel physical comedy that comes from nowhere other than mocking little people.
I don't really have a problem with this because with David Brent, Gervais made this work by being at once painfully funny but also having a humanity inside the character so that this would often come through from under the façade. Unfortunately with Life's Too Short there isn't anything like this and the whole piece pretty much is Davis being this way with little else of interest outside of the next dumb thing he is going to do. This affects the plotting quite badly because I have to say I wasn't really interested in the character or the situations and it left the show feeling like just a collection of bits, like a sketch show.
Viewing it as a sketch show is probably best because there are actually some very funny moments and I did laugh several times per episode. The morbid and the off-the-wall stuff works best and there are loads of great lines and scenes. What doesn't work is the frequent humour at the expense of Davis' height – the show was publicised with lots of comments about it not being cruel or mocking but it is hard to get away from the feeling that a lot of it actually is. Whether falling out of cars, being unable to reach things and so on, there is a lot of stuff that is purely laughing at him because of his size and very little of it is actually funny. The celebrity cameos are a mixed bag too; some of them work really well but some of them don't have particularly good material. That there are so many of them is distracting as well, and it does eventually feel like a parade of Gervais' mates – which is also added to by the fact that Merchant and Gervais themselves feel like unnecessary characters who only exist as an easy device to get some way to have the celeb cameos within the flow of the narrative.
Davis himself is pretty good and would have benefited from more opportunity to have given more pathos and pain rather than yet another scene of him falling over or climbing something; I also didn't like the feeling that he was constantly just giving an impression of Gervais, since the character's personality is one he would deliver. Brody is amusing as his accountant but Hanson is far too obvious as the dopey assistant while Enright is just too bland as the ex-wife. Gervais and Merchant are OK in their roles and the celebs mostly are OK, but all of them deserved to have more to work with.
Life's Too Short isn't particularly bad and it does have plenty of funny moments spread across the episodes, but it does play like a sketch show rather than something with flow and meaning behind it. The pathos and humanity is absent and too much of the comedy is rather basic cruel physical comedy that comes from nowhere other than mocking little people.
