With Friends having proven to be a popular worldwide phenomenon, it was only natural that British companies would have a piece of the pie. Some would be more successful than others – Coupling, released in 2000, made it to four series and is still fondly remembered today, whilst 1998’s Babes In The Wood, primed to be the next British success, vanished after 2 series with little trace. Today, however, this blog focuses on one of the more notable failures – the 2001 sitcom Sam’s Game.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a backstory to this sitcom – all that is known about this one was that it was designed as a sitcom vehicle for Davina McCall, who at that point was best known for starring in shows such as Streetmate. This however was a bit of a leap for her, for she had rarely done scripted stuff like this.
The main writer for the show is, interestingly enough, Paul Waite (although Ed Bryne also receives partial credit for the writing). This was not the first time he had created an American-style sitcom – he also wrote for Get Real, a short-lived Seinfeld-esque sitcom in 1997.
Considering its current reputation nowadays, it is surprising that the reviews for it are more mixed – whilst most newspapers considered it to be unfunny, others were willing to point out the high notes of it – The Daily Telegraph was actually willing to praise the cast (good), the jokes, (funny) and the scripts (“more polished than most”), whilst in his book, Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy, Mark Lewisohn described the show as having good moments, competent acting, and “refreshingly” steering clear of the vulgarity associated with contemporary flat-share sitcoms.
Regardless, however, the show didn’t do very well, averaging only 5.5 million over 30 minutes upon its debut, numbers which were at the time considered to be very low. Presumably, they didn’t pick it up because it was never picked up for another series. Nowadays, the show isn’t fondly remembered, making it into the Metro’s “10 Sitcoms Worse Than The Wright Way” (a show that this blog has covered before) and being considered a bit of a dud. Release-wise, it has never been released on DVD and is unavailable on Youtube, although you can apparently find it on FreeVee and I personally managed to find it on the STV Player.
The show attempts to differentiate itself from Friends through two factors. First, there are only four roommates – Sam (Davina McCall) is the gutsy one and is the one the show focuses on the most. A lot of her storylines seem to focus on her love life. In fact, a lot of the stories in the show are focused on relationships, whether it be dumping someone or pretending that someone is their girlfriend. With this in mind, if you do want to watch the show, do so with the intention that you’re definitely sure you love hearing about relationships. Sam is okay as a character, but she’s quite bland and I wasn’t too immersed in her plots.
She isn’t the only one navigating life in the streets of London however – living with her is Alex (Ed Bryne) , a neurotic and slightly (although not broadly thankfully) ditzy Irishmen who are illegally subletting to Sam (although this is a plot point which only comes up in the first episode). He’s the best of the characters and that can be attributed to Ed Byrne’s previous experience as a comedian, meaning that he actually gets some good jokes out of the mediocre script (I’ll admit, I laughed when Alex decided to promote “Doors” as the Windows successor in “Mumma’s Kitchen”) and adds a bright cheeriness to the script.
Living nearby is the hunky Phil (Tristan Gemmill), who fits the stereotypical manly man, what with his obsession with girls. The final episode has him even fearing his masculinity when he finds that he has a low sperm count. Phil is apparently intended to be Sam’s eventual love interest, having some ship tease moments before finally almost making out in the final episode. However, I personally found more chemistry between Alex and Sam during the period where they had to fake being boyfriend and girlfriend respectively than Sam and Phil. He also suffers from the weakest acting, with Gemmill’s delivery sounding almost like cardboard at times, although this does improve slightly in later episodes.
It should be also noted that the other way the show differentiates itself from Friends is that they actually have a character of color in there in the gossipy Marcia (Tameka Empson). Whilst I liked her for her snarkiness and appreciate the show for at least not having an all-white cast, she gets relatively little screentime compared to the others and a character in Episode 4 called “Mumma” feels too close to Black stereotypes (I mean, just look at the name!) in the fourth episode does date this show a little.
Continuing the Friends resemblance, all four of them regularly meet as a sandwich bar/café (it might be called George’s, but the name only ever seems to come about in blink-and-you-will-miss-it moments, so I’m not quite sure) and have exactly the sort of things that you would get from fairly unperturbed youths of the world, which is, as I warned before, relationships.
The trouble with this show is that it doesn’t do very much to differentiate itself from other sitcoms – the first episode alone juggles the “he’s not my boyfriend despite what it looks like” cliché to almost ridiculous and contrived standards and others have very dull plots such as “I want to dump my mate so I must act as annoying as possible” (to be fair, they do provide a reason why Sam acts like that – she thinks her boyfriend is too kind and she wants to keep a gift car – but it does make her come off as unnecessarily cruel) and “friend’s (in this case Phil) new girlfriend is really annoying” which has been done better in other sitcoms. Yes, old tricks can be done in innovative ways, but in this case, this is not something that the show has done, and it isn’t helped by the fact that the characters never get the chance to move beyond mere sketches of characters. It certainly isn’t vulgar – outside of a couple of sperm jokes in the final episode perhaps – but the show can best be described as comfort food – it doesn’t deliberately do anything to offend, but there is little value to it either.
As for my favorite episode, it might be “Slogan” – there’s a bit of a burst of black comedy in the gang trying to get an answer to a competition off a dead guy and the final joke of Alex thinking that the capital of Canada was “Canada City” did make me laugh. Plus, it felt a bit more unique plot-wise than the other episodes.
In conclusion, you’re better off watching Friends instead. Still, it’s on the STV Player if you want to watch it.
