Elevator pitch: Depressed Edward Gorey character, his needy, neglected wife (Olivia Colman!) and their two failed-to-launch adult children live in a remote woodsy area, amidst no-less-peculiar neighbors. You'll recall that Will Sharpe's Sherlock certainly seemed to be bipolar, with touches of OCD and Tourette's. Here we have all that and more, including maybe schizophrenia and being congenitally "so rude that you're doomed to die a virgin," as one of the younger Flowerses says to her brother. The one attractive, normal-seeming character, who's being pursued by both of them, is really just the best at keeping her issues hidden; she gets written out of the show pretty quickly.
The start-and-stop plot is propelled along by several stunted artistic projects--the latest of Mr Flowers's Snickety children's books ("The Grubbs," disdained by his humorless publishers), Mrs Flowers's tell-all memoir ("Living with the Devil," no offense meant, I'm sure) and daughter Amy's chamber cantata about the Flowers family curse (it's complicated...). Sharpe himself steals the show as Shun, Mr. F's live-in illustrator and body man; he does some great freestylin' à la Robin Williams in the first season, but his shtick gets old far too soon. (He's half-Japanese, btw, so only the English half's taking work away from an equally qualified Asian actor.)
The Flowers ménage takes some getting used to at first, but we found the rest of the season quite entertaining, occasionally poignant (most notably, Shun's monologue about the events that brought him to England from Japan). Season two gets off to a decent start, but we started having doubts pretty quickly; for one thing, Sharpe the comedy writer doesn't give himself and his colleagues much to work with.
I've read that "Flowers" was influenced by Japanese TV comedy, in which, from what little I've seen, improv and mimicry of out-of-control behavior are more highly prized than they are over here (by us at any rate). By S2e3 we were feeling like one of those much-missed Netflix reviewers who so often wanted the last half-hour of their lives back...
The start-and-stop plot is propelled along by several stunted artistic projects--the latest of Mr Flowers's Snickety children's books ("The Grubbs," disdained by his humorless publishers), Mrs Flowers's tell-all memoir ("Living with the Devil," no offense meant, I'm sure) and daughter Amy's chamber cantata about the Flowers family curse (it's complicated...). Sharpe himself steals the show as Shun, Mr. F's live-in illustrator and body man; he does some great freestylin' à la Robin Williams in the first season, but his shtick gets old far too soon. (He's half-Japanese, btw, so only the English half's taking work away from an equally qualified Asian actor.)
The Flowers ménage takes some getting used to at first, but we found the rest of the season quite entertaining, occasionally poignant (most notably, Shun's monologue about the events that brought him to England from Japan). Season two gets off to a decent start, but we started having doubts pretty quickly; for one thing, Sharpe the comedy writer doesn't give himself and his colleagues much to work with.
I've read that "Flowers" was influenced by Japanese TV comedy, in which, from what little I've seen, improv and mimicry of out-of-control behavior are more highly prized than they are over here (by us at any rate). By S2e3 we were feeling like one of those much-missed Netflix reviewers who so often wanted the last half-hour of their lives back...