The French Seinfeld doesn’t translate
LOST IN TRANSLOCATION
In his native France, it’s no exaggeration to describe comedian Gad Elmaleh as the French Seinfeld. He was featured on The Daily Show in the days of Jon Stewart, has had his own standup special on Netflix and now brings his
own self-starring, Curb Your Enthusiasm-meets-Entourage-style show to the streaming service, cocreated with Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul, the team behind Fox’s short-lived and under-appreciated 2015 show The Grinder.
In Huge in France, Elmaleh plays himself — a hugely successful French comedian who in spite of his success at home is feeling that there’s more to life than being the Seinfeld of France. So he decides that maybe he should relocate to LA, spend some quality time with his estranged son Luke (Jordan ver Hoeve) and his former partner, retired model/ Gwyneth Paltrow-type life consultant Vivian (Erinn Hayes). The problem is that Luke and Vivian want very little to do with him and are perfectly happy in the company of Vivian’s new former-model boyfriend Jason Alan Ross (Matthew del Negro). And in the US, Elmaleh is a nobody. Teamed up with a geeky, ineffectual assistant named Brian Kurihara (Scott Keiji Takeda), he must navigate the
New World in which he’s more deadbeat dad than comic superstar and which continually perplexes him with its #MeToo attitudes to sex and its focus on superficial values.
There are long-running jokes about his son’s attempts to get pec implants that will allow him to become a successful male model, and Jason’s method-acting attempts to reignite his failing career by playing a famous male model in an upcoming film. While there are some solid jokes here — including a chuckle-inducing Jerry Seinfeld cameo and a joke involving fake moustaches — the series as a whole suffers from a lack of focus and splits its story into two separate but not very solidly gelled parts.
On the one hand we have Elmaleh
struggling to cope with the fact that being a megastar in France means very little in LA, and on the other we have the Californicationstyle, precocious, surface-beauty-heavy family dynamics of Vivian, Luke and Jason. Unlike the shows that it obviously references
— Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage,
Californication etcetera — Huge in France suffers from an inability to focus its satire on one character and ends up feeling as if two different shows have being welded together with horribly obvious uneven results.
Elmaleh’s particular talent for mixing perplexed incredulity with relatable human pathos is given far too little opportunity to shine as the story veers off to the other side of the family with mixed results. The story of his struggle to come to terms with his anonymity in the centre of the entertainment world in spite of his homegrown success is unevenly contrasted with the struggle of Luke’s adopted father Jason’s attempts to be more than just a hunk of meat tasked with impregnating Vivian and trying to make one last push for showbiz success. The teenage Luke becomes the object of both of his father figures’ ambitions but he’s little more than a cutout, and because he’s not the focus of the show, things quickly become messy, foggy and unengaging.
That’s a shame because it’s clear that both Elmaleh and Del Negro have talent that’s wasted here. Huge in France suffers from a grandiose ambition to be a show about a father trying to connect with his son while also offering a pointed, satirical critique of the idea of fame and the surface obsessions of LA, and manages to fail to hit its targets on both fronts. In effect, it ends up proving that Elmaleh, while he may be big in Paris, has very little to say about the US that Americans haven’t said more piercingly and intelligently about themselves before. This is disappointing because the fishout-of-water trope that it plays on is potentially a rich vein to mine. This show doesn’t demonstrate that and only makes you wonder why the comedian didn’t decide to remain huge in France and turn his gaze on his own society. Instead he fails so spectacularly in his attempt to say something we haven’t already heard about in relation to another.
LHuge in France is available to stream on Netflix.