Horst_In_Translation Review of Mirrorball

Mirrorball (2000 TV Movie)

I probably would not have kept watching

[4/10 · 27 January 2019]

Here we have "Mirrorball", a television half-hour live action short film from 2000, so this one is already almost 20 years old. This is a British BBC production and it is closely connected to AbFab, the long-running successful series also from BBC and they got the key cast members back for this television special. The director is prolific actor Adrian Edmondson, who is the husband (still today) of lead actress and writer Jennifer Saunders. The latter is at the very center of it all, but it is at least about smaller characters and supporting performances here. Mix of characters and differing screen times are fine, maybe the film could have needed some more men in my opinion, but I don't think this is the key reason why this pilot episodes was not picked up. That would be too easy. I personally think that AbFab was enough already in terms of cast and characters and there is no need to reinvent something using the same actresses with just weaker quality. Some gags weren't that bad admittedly, but as a whole the laugh-out-loud moments weren't frequent enough to me for a positive recommendation here. I also struggled with the laugh track, which I normally don't do too much, but here it became quickly annoying as itg was also used on more than just a few at best mildly funny references as if they were trying to tell the (actually existing) audience when to laugh. I also have a feeling this would not have gotten better after the pilot episode and there were some characters where the pilot already felt too much and honestly I would not really want to know more about them. Some of them also felt too similar. A whole lot of the criticisms from me here are entirely subjective and I can perfectly understand that other people may have different opinion. It is also a special brand of humor that not everybody will warm up to easily. So my suggestion is if you really liked AbFab, then go give this one a try, but don't expectg too much. If you don't or have never seen AbFab, then skip the watch. Mirrorball is not a failure, but I give it a thumbs-down overall.