Peep Show

On the surface, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the British sitcom Peep Show. David Mitchell and Robert Webb starred as Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Osborne, a pair of twentysomething losers who shared the same South London flat. The obsessive, luckless Mark was employed in a dull, go-nowhere office job, while the unemployed Jeremy (aka "Jez") was lazy and opportunistic, vaguely pursuing a career as a pop star. Both roomies fantasized endlessly about women, with Mark carrying a torch for co-worker Sophie Chapman (Olivia Colman) and Jeremy going gaga over his divorced neighbor Toni (Elizabeth Marmur). Others in the cast included Sophie's insufferably good-looking boyfriend, Geoff (Neil Fitzmaurice), and Jez's manipulative pal and fellow musician Super Hans (Matt King). This being a an early-21st century effort, much of the humor was derived from the scripts' overabundance of sexual single-entendres and the frequent public humiliations endured by the principals. What set Peep Show apart from the standard Odd Couple-Men Behaving Badly was its first-person camerawork -- that is, the camera frequently acted as the "eyes" of the main characters, while the soundtrack revealed their innermost thoughts, in the tradition of Strange Interlude. It was a highly sophisticated and technically complicated gimmick, and it worked brilliantly. Peep Show was seen on BBC2 beginning September 1, 2003.