Photo: HBO
Back in the early days of The Ricky Gervais Show, when it was only a podcast and not an animated adaptation of a podcast, Stephen Merchant was the only part of it I could enjoy unreservedly. The titular host was too obnoxious, and third seat Karl Pilkington was, I'm still pretty sure, just a very good improviser who never broke character, but Stephen's interjections were always perfectly timed, his stories relatable and hilarious. I even appreciated the way he'd sometimes tell Ricky to shut up so that Karl could get through a thought (such as it was). When Extras came along, Merchant's Darren Lamb, useless talent agent/idiot, was my favourite character by far. Then, a couple of years ago, Dave and I went to see Merchant's standup show (also called Hello Ladies), and I realized something: Merchant is a born sidekick.
It's not that he's not funny. It's that his comic persona -- goofy, clueless, socially awkward -- is best deployed in small doses; a lot of him is...a lot, but also too little. The premise of the show -- computer programmer Stuart (still called "Stephen" on IMDb, as of this writing) tries and fails to find love at the clubs of Los Angeles when it's pretty obvious his perfect match is actually his tenant, Jessica (Christine Woods) -- is that the protagonist is a flailing beta male. So if all the supporting characters are, necessarily, subordinate to a character whose natural state is subordination, the show isn't really anchored by anyone. Because Merchant doesn't have the presence of a series lead, it feels like the show is just all sidekicks, searching vainly for a strong figure they can play off and comment on. (Say what you will about Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath -- I certainly have -- but at least she has conviction.)
But the real problem with Hello Ladies is male privilege. HEY, WHERE'S EVERYONE GOING?
I'll keep this short, I promise. I think there's a reason that America -- even the male half -- was okay with Sex & The City, Bridget Jones's Diary, Girls, and other fairly recent pop-cultural products that revolve around women pursuing men (sex) in frank, straightforward ways. Not to say that these shows and movies don't portray real female behaviour of a kind that has only started to be acknowledged in recent years (or decades, at least); it's exaggerated, but true. But underlying fictional stories in which women are sexual aggressors -- and celebrated for it -- is the fact that it's only relatively lately in human civilization that women have been able to exercise that kind of agency openly. So we root for female characters when they upend what was, for centuries, the natural order of human relations because doing so is still kind of revolutionary.
Shorter: it doesn't skeeve me to watch female characters trying to get laid because women are still underdogs in nearly every other respect. It does sometimes skeeve me to watch male characters trying to get laid because it can feel like nothing more than another boring iteration of male power.
COME BACK, EVERYBODY! It's just something I've noticed about shows that, over the years, tried to be the male Sex & The City, like Jake In Progress, The Mind Of The Married Man, Love Monkey, Men At Work, and the only one that actually hung on for a significant length of time: Entourage. (I guess there's also The Bachelor, but that one's not funny on purpose.) In addition to how hard it is to root for a man on the prowl -- no matter how carefully you calibrate, it can still end up rapey -- there's the fact that what made Sex & The City important (for all my problems with it) is that it wasn't "the female" anything. Trying to take one of the few gynocentric TV properties and give it a male spin...I mean, I don't know what it was like to live in Ceylon when it was colonized by the British, but I bet at least one person was like, "You already have everything else -- you need this too?!"
Back to Hello Ladies, which thinks it's the male Girls, crossed with Curb Your Enthusiasm. (The fact that Merchant's character is still called "Stephen" on IMDb makes me wonder how late in the development process the decision was made for him to play a computer programmer as opposed to "himself.") It's given us a protagonist who's inconsiderate, spineless, cheap, and weird. Am I actually supposed to be on his side as he tries to inflict all of this upon the women of Los Angeles, plus his penis? There's just no way.