'How Dare You?! I've Been To Oxford!' 'Yes -- For Lunch.'

The multi-camera sitcom, once a proud and even respectable pillar of Must See TV, has in recent years fallen to shit. Today's multi-camera sitcoms aren't cool, ironic, and critically acclaimed, like Arrested Development or Parks & Recreation. Instead, they're "family-friendly" (toothless), not "too smart for their own good" (stupid), and all but ignored by critics (you sure fooled us, How I Met Your Mother). It's enough to make the thoughtful TV viewer write off the format altogether...until now. Vicious has come to PBS.

As our own Andi Teran alerted us all back in 2012, Vicious is the work of a multi-cam veteran: series creator Gary Janetti, late of Will & Grace. It stars Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as Freddie and Stuart, who've been together for forty-eight years, and Frances de la Tour as their straight lady friend Violet. And it's fucking amazing. So now we know: all it takes to revive the moldering corpse of the multi-cam sitcom is to cast one with some of the most legendary stage actors in Britain. (It should be easy to replicate the model in the U.S., since I'm pretty sure Brían O'Byrne and Patti Lupone are dying to set something up together at Carsey-Werner.)

Jacobi and McKellen are, of course, brilliant on film -- Dead Again, the X-Men movies (other than the Brett Ratner one) -- but watching them in front of a live studio audience feels as thrilling as getting to see them in a really sharp comedic play must be: obviously, their timing is impeccable, and even if the show were nothing but the two of them sniping at each other like half a troop of Golden Girls, it would still work perfectly. For instance, Stuart's side of a phone call with his mother, which opens the series: "Oh, God! Oh, how dreadful! Oh, at least he didn't suffer. ...Oh, he DID?! Oh my. ...THAT much?" Stuart's mother has just informed him that Clive, a friend of decades' standing, has died (apparently horribly), so Stuart, Freddie, Violet, and a couple of their other aging friends will be attending the funeral and sharing their reminiscences about him. Jokes about their relative degrees of decrepitude, jokes about Stuart's paltry refreshments afterward, jokes about their memories of the late Clive, an independent "man's man" despite his two wives and six children -- enough story to sustain an episode, right?

But wait, there's more! Because Stuart and Freddie also have another big change to adjust to: young Ash (Game Of Thrones psycho Iwan Rheon, sort of a mushier Hugh Dancy type here) has moved in upstairs, and neither the vicious old queens nor game Violet (who's not sure whether Zac Efron is a person or a place) can pin down whether he's in "the family" or not. Rheon is somewhat overmatched by his co-stars, but anyone who's around the right age to play that role probably would be. Well, not, say, Ben Whishaw. But to be fair, he's five years Rheon's senior, and looks it, and is probably pretty busy.

The only bad thing about Vicious is that, because it's British, there are only six episodes. But its Britishness is also the source of almost all its gorgeous perfection; Janetti does America proud by bringing Vicious into our lives.