Not Going Out

[Alan Brady's Hair]

This just turned up on Peacock. Starring comedian Lee Mack, it seems to be the second longest-running UK sitcom, now in its 13th series.

I think this might be the most American-accessible Britcom I've seen. If you like 2 1/2 Men, you'll probably like this (it's a little raunchier than 2 1/2).

A lot of the plot feels familiar: Lee Mack plays Lee, an underachiever who rents a room in an apartment owned by his best friend, Tim, and Tim's girlfriend, Kate. They break up, Tim moves out, and his girlfriend gets custody of Lee. The very thin plot is Tim trying to get back with Kate and Lee developing a crush on Kate, but it's mostly just a lot of unlikely occurrences.

The actress who played Kate left after one series, and Kate was replaced by Tim's sister Lucy, an overachiever who buys the apartment but keeps Lee on as a tenant. She's younger and hotter than Kate, so Lee's inevitable crush on her is even less promising, but it runs through six series. The episodes are somewhat uneven, as Lee sometimes overreaches and Lucy's just yelling at him the whole episode. The funny episodes, though, are very funny with some gut-busting laughs in them.

Im in series 7 right now. I believe the show is radically overhauled in series 8.

[icecream]

Raunchier than Two and a Half Men, that is a sure sign I will never want to watch.

[Alan Brady's Hair]

I posted a lot of this elsewhere, but wanted to include it here, too. I've watched Series 8-13 of Not Going Out, and it's a pretty remarkable change of format.

Spoilers for "Not Going Out" below:

The will-they/won't-they couple, married in the last episode of Series 7, start Series 8 seven years later, with three kids. They and their friends have moved to the suburbs.

Mack is a standup and Series 1-7 largely consisted of knockout punch jokes. Series 8 continued in that vein, but in Series 9 the writing got oddly targeted. One episode "felt" quite similar to the Everybody Loves Raymond episode, "Liars." Two episodes later is very similar to the Raymond episode "Boob Job."

So, what is going on here? Not Going Out premiered in 2006. It turns out that in 2013 Lee Mack and Catherine Tate made a pilot for a sitcom called "The Smiths", which would be a UK remake of Everybody Loves Raymond. That pilot didn't sell.

The Not Going Out reformatting occurred in 2017, and it looks like once The Smiths pilot didn't sell, they just used Mack's existing show to recreate Raymond as best they could. There's even twins among the three kids. The grandparents don't live across the street, but they're in most of the episodes.

Lee Mack, at least, admits some sort of debt to Raymond in the new format. Speaking of Raymond's creator Phil Rosenthal, Mack said:

His rules were that someone in the writers' room had to say, "Yeah, that happened to me." So I decided that was going to be the rule this year - that there was always some nugget of truth. It doesn't always have to be in our lives; we can know someone it happened to. As long as we know that it's based in truth.’

https://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2...not_going_out#

Not Going Out episodes that may have some connection to Everybody Loves Raymond scripts: Bust Up, Pants on Fire, Marriage Guidance, Builder, Enough, and Hospital.

It's a pretty funny show overall, has the same weakness as late seasons of Raymond: sometimes Lee messes up early in the episode, and his wife is just nagging him end-to-end.

Hugh Dennis, who is the UK version of Ryan Stiles, is part of a couple that's very reminiscent of Two and a Half Men's Herb and Judith. He's very funny.