Sink or Schwimmer
T’S hard to look past the fact that Ross from Friends, has somehow lost his way from Central Perk and ended up in an intelligence agency. It doesn’t help that David Schwimmer doesn’t seem to have aged one bit since his Central Perk days either.
But it’s an exciting bit of casting as the American sitcom superstar rocks up in this
British workplace comedy, created by The Job Lot actor Nick Mohammed.
The set up is the inner workings at GCHQ – a geekier version of MI5, where they tackle international and domestic cyber crime from a desktop.
A little bit like comedy W1A, which satirised the BBC, this sends up another institution that you’d imagine to be very serious – when in actual fact, the intelligence agency is just full of a bunch of incompetents.
In the opener, pompous maverick agent Jerry (Schwimmer) arrives from the US to join the team. Shades on, Bluetooth headphones in, arrogance oozing out of him, he thinks he’s out of Top Gun.
He also assumes he can take over the team, but Director of Cyber Security Christine (Sylvestra Le Touzel) is less impressed with the shake-up.
Faced with limited support, Jerry enlists inept computer analyst Joseph (Mohammed) as his unofficial personal assistant and then begins on some awful team building exercises.
“I want to raise morale so high people can barely move,” says Jerry, who also wants a gym, a protein shake, an Alexa and a window.
Can this American idiot really combat cyber terrorism? Not at this rate. A funny premise with plenty of potential.