Sunday, July 27, 2008

Spaced

Mrs Vache Folle bought me the DVDs of the BBC series "Spaced", and we watched half of the first season last night. Simon Pegg, of "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" fame, wrote and starred in the series with his collaborator Jessica Hynes. They play Tim and Daisy, two twenty something slackers with artistic "ambitions" (he's a comic book artist who works in a comic book store, and she's a would be writer). They pretend to be a couple in order to rent a flat together. The building in which they live is owned by Marsha, who lives upstairs with her teenage daughter, and who is enamored of Brian, the weird, dark-obsessed painter in the basement. Add in Daisy's best friend, Twist, who is "in fashion" (she works at a dry cleaners) and Brian's best friend Mike, a weapons freak, and you have the makings of a surreal comedy. Oh, and let's not forget Tim's ex-girlfriend who only recently kicked him out and Daisy's long distance boyfriend in Hull.

This series could only have been made in Great Britain and could only have been carried off so well by the likes of Pegg and his crew. If there's ever an American version of "Spaced", it would have to be on HBO. Otherwise, it would become "Ned and Stacy".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

They tried to make an American version of Spaced. On Fox. McG was producing. I think they made a pilot but it didn't get picked up. There was a huge kerfuffle about the fact that they splashed Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's names all over the trade pages (ignoring Jessica Hynes completely as she doesn't have celebrity in the States) in relation to the remake when they had nothing to do with it and were never even spoken to about it. Thankfully it is never going to happen now. Spaced is Spaced. It's not a version, it is what it is.