Reggie Perrin (Martin Clunes), a marketing executive at a corporation that manufactures grooming products, battles the boredom of middle age by fantasizing about punching out his egotistical jerk of a boss, causing great harm to his nagging mother, and living a life of bliss with the new head of his company’s balms and lubricants division.

CRITIQUE

I’m aware of The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, the 1970s BBC series of which Reggie Perrin is a modern-day updating, but I’ve never seen any of it. I do know that it was beloved by millions and is fondly remembered, which may explain why this revamp didn’t go over so well. Despite the “Set One” tacked to this release’s title, what you’ll fine here is actually the entire series, which ran for two six-episode seasons before recently being axed by the BBC. According to which line of reasoning you choose to believe, the show was cancelled either because the ratings weren’t so hot or because the show didn’t appeal to a young demographic. If the latter is true, I can certainly understand why the younger folk weren’t tuning in, as relating to Reggie isn’t something someone who hasn’t toiled in the nine-to-five world can do. As for the former, I can sort of understand why the show’s viewership declined over the course of its run, as it’s lumpy and unfocused, not really sure what it wants to be or where it wants to go. It’s often incredibly funny, but it indecisively wants to be more, and that’s where it stumbles.

Something bugged me from the very beginning, but it wasn’t until I reached the end of the first season that I figured out exactly what it was: this series feels like the second act of a story. The show sort of kicks off in mid-stride, not really bothering to introduce us to or develop Reggie before getting going; it’s almost as if David Nobbs (who created the original show and wrote the novel on which it was based) and Simon Nye (who previously found success with Clunes on Men Behaving Badly), who developed this incarnation and co-wrote all twelve episodes, expected viewers to use the original series to inform this one. Either that or they expected the ennui Perrin feels to be so universal that no further embellishment was needed. Whatever the case, they were mistaken. When both Reggie and his schoolteacher wife Nicola (Fay Ripley) begin feeling ignored or unnoticed, we don’t know what to make of it, as we know next to nothing about them. Is it boredom, the seven-year itch, or is their marriage really in trouble? And Reggie’s relationship with Jasmine (the impossibly lovely Lucy Liemann), the object of many of his daydreams, comes to a head far too quickly; it takes only three or four episodes to build when it should have taken more than twice that. (That’s a purely storytelling standpoint, mind you. Were this the real world, anyone falling hard and fast for Liemann would be perfectly understandable.)

The second season works better than the first, offering a milked-for-all-it’s-worth arc that upends what’s come before and takes the show in a direction that would have been quite satisfying were it, too, not rushed. Its effectiveness is also undermined by a secondary plot that isn’t sufficiently fleshed-out and is, thanks to the show’s cancellation, left unresolved, leaving viewers to twist in the wind, futilely waiting for a third act that isn’t coming. (In a strange way, had the show run for or five seasons, the finale of the twelfth episode could have made for a perversely perfect series finale.) It’s obvious Nobbs and Nye put a little more thought and planning into the overall architecture of this season, and fine-tuned more than a couple things, but their stubborn, annoying desire to cover too much ground in too little time once again hobbles their creation.

In terms of laughs, though, the show delivers. Anyone who’s ever sat behind a desk for hours on end and wished they had a gun will surely appreciate Reggie’s views on the modern workplace. And anyone who’s ever been forced to suffer gladly the foolishness of upper management (my hand is raised) will surely appreciate the bits where Reggie fantasizes about using a blowgun to end his bosses’ inane babblings and clueless suggestions for improvement. I can’t remember the last time I saw a show make such good use of running gags--the increasingly bizarre reasons for Reggie’s tardiness, in particular, are great, and the repeated use of an old clip of tortoises mating offers one of the show’s biggest laughs. The show even manages to make good use of characters who are little more than stereotypes, such as Vicki (Kerry Howard), Reggie’s dim-bulb personal assistant (the show’s almost worth watching to hear what the guys in the car park call her), and Sue (Susan Earl), the ineffectual, terminally messed-up “Wellness Person” at Reggie’s company. When Reggie’s boss creates a commercial that’s self-indulgent, nonsensical, pretentious, and does nothing to indicate what type of product it’s attempting to sell, the intelligentsia naturally declare it a post-modern masterpiece. And the way in which Reggie explains modern manufacturing to his wife’s class is a howl.

So, yeah, I laughed an awful lot, just not quite enough to cut the show enough slack to give it a pass. I’m a little bummed the show was canned, as I’d like to have seen if Nobbs and Nye could eventually have pulled it all together. At the same time, though, I’d have been bummed had it carried on without getting any better focused.                           

THE VIDEO

The series is presented in its original 1.78:1 aspect ratio; the image has been enhanced for anamorphic displays, and the twelve episodes have been spread across two discs. Shot on digital video, the show has a soft look, which is pretty much in keeping with the norm for recent British comedies. The second season isn’t quite as soft, and the lighting isn’t quite as harsh in the studio segments, as if the producers were trying to camouflage the studio-bound nature of the footage and/or trying to give it and the location work a more uniform look (which may have been a reaction to complaints that the show looked more like a relic from the early ‘70s). For what it is, it’s perfectly fine.

THE AUDIO

The same is true of the audio, which is presented in the original Dolby Digital Stereo. It’s center-heavy, with the dialogue, bits of music, and what sounds like a laugh track (although it could be sweetened studio-audience laughter, I suppose) mixed together dead in the middle. You can hear everything, which is the entire point, so there’s nothing to really complain about. English SDH subtitles are available (and they definitely come in handy when the accents get too thick).

THE EXTRAS

The only extra is a behind-the-scenes photo gallery, which is presented in the form of a slideshow set to the show’s theme music.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Funny and muddled in rought equal measure, Reggie Perrin is good gor laughs but it's not hard to see why it didn't really catch on.