Spoiler alert: this article contains details about the series three finale of People Just Do Nothing.
We live in the age of the unfunny comedy. Really, that’s no bad thing: by keeping the sitcom’s naturalism and irreverence while shifting the focus to drama, brilliant shows like Transparent, Flowers, Fleabag and Master of None can provide complex insight into relationships, identity and the human condition without seeming sentimental or hard-going. But now that comedy is vaunted as much for its emotional impact as the capacity to elicit actual laughter, it can feel like the genre is no longer concerned with fulfilling its primary function. The real question is: if you can get through a whole episode of your favourite comedy show without so much as a snigger, is it really a comedy show at all?
While TV has been undergoing this existential crisis, there has been one programme plugging away at the lost art of making people laugh. The BBC’s scrappy mockumentary People Just Do Nothing, which follows a manchild-run garage radio station in Brentford, is not an old-fashioned sitcom by any stretch – it’s understated, meta and set in a niche subculture – but it is truly traditional in its comedy: beats are hit and joke quotas filled, scene in, scene out.
But People Just Do Nothing’s third series, which concluded last night, has seen the sitcom undergo a shift. After four years of broadcasting to a presumably modest but dedicated audience (the corporation don’t release comprehensive iPlayer viewing figures), the BBC are finally taking it seriously. It got a rare two-series commission late last year, and the change of transmission – from releasing the series in bulk on iPlayer to putting out weekly episodes with a follow-up showing on BBC2 – is proof that the Beeb believe PJDN is becoming about as close to appointment-TV as it’s possible to get in the Netflix age.
Yet the vagaries of the UK garage game and the goings-on in the fool’s paradise that is Kurupt FM cannot sustain a sitcom forever, and considering PJDN is poised to be in it for the long-haul, it’s no surprise that the show has decided to go for the dramatic jugular. The final episode of this series offered fans a precious opportunity to laugh and cry at exactly the same time by showing the characters responding in typically half-witted fashion to such major life events as Beats having a baby, Miche and Grindah’s breakup and the death of Steves’ nan. By making you care about the characters (even the monstrosity that is MC Grindah – a David Brent with malicious intent), viewers will now have two reasons for tuning in.
It’s easy to see why the BBC has decided to put its weight behind the show. By refreshing the tropes of beloved sitcoms like the Office with more grotesquely self-involved characters and jokes about modern life, music and drugs (the episode where Grindah panics after taking a pill at his club night has good claim to be the comic highlight of 2015), People Just Do Nothing holds an appeal for everybody, from post-TV teens to their parents and beyond. But whether veering into comedy drama territory will pay dividends remains to be seen – especially since the main reason the show works so brilliantly is because of its unaffected simplicity. Every character is really, quite comfortingly, dense, and their inability to read scenarios correctly is the source of nearly all the comedy. Its mind-bending mundanity and pared-down plotlines are the perfect compliment; to create more involved narrative arcs might undermine what is so special about the show: namely, how studiously stupid it all is.
Promisingly, the industry bod behind PJDN is Ash Atalla, who also produced the Office. Alongside its trailblazing cringe comedy, by the end of the latter’s run it was very much playing for pathos rather than side-splitting potential; one of the things that helped usher in this age of human-condition comedy. It’s clear that Atalla knows how to convert a show from niche concern to cultural touchstone without losing its essence better than most. And because People Just Do Nothing built its identity around its laugh-out-loud principles, dipping a toe into dramatic waters doesn’t feel like a comedy cop-out. If Atalla’s midas touch holds, it could find itself in the best of both worlds.
