The 'Life's Too Short' Thread

[RandyChimp]

I still reckon Tim and Dawn were mainly Steves idea.

"Tim is based on a guy I used to work with mixed with Norm from Cheers, a little Chandler and a touch of Oliver Hardy." - Ricky

By Tim and Dawn, I meant their story thoughout the series, their silent love that ends with them getting together. Besides which, I said mainly, which doesn't imply it was entirely steve. I just get this feeling that he's more into writing meaningful relationships between characters than Ricky is.

Just a hypothetical theory, I'm most likely completely wrong.

[BritishHobo]

For some reason this discussion made me really desperate to see what Matthew Perry thinks of Life's Too Short. He was pretty vocal in loving The Office.

[CantSayBien]

I still reckon Tim and Dawn were mainly Steves idea.

"Tim is based on a guy I used to work with mixed with Norm from Cheers, a little Chandler and a touch of Oliver Hardy." - Ricky

By Tim and Dawn, I meant their story thoughout the series, their silent love that ends with them getting together. Besides which, I said mainly, which doesn't imply it was entirely steve. I just get this feeling that he's more into writing meaningful relationships between characters than Ricky is.

Just a hypothetical theory, I'm most likely completely wrong.

I dunno, I always felt the whole Andy-Maggie thing in Extras was more Ricky influenced. Almost a bit like his real-life friendship with Karl.

It's hard to say anything which isn't just plain conjecture though. They were probably both major contributors to most aspects of both series.

[LegoOfThemBricks]

Negative:
Newsday - http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/dwarf-comedy-can-be-short-on-laughs-1.3533076

That's hardly negative, is it? Yes it doesn't fawn all over it like some of the other reviews you linked, but it does ultimately recommend the show.

The Huffington Post one is excellent though, very accurate, thanks for all the links

[vincentvega]

As good as the Huffington Post one is, it falls into the trap of being hugely critical of Gervais himself. I don't consider this a flaw as such, but I feel it'll be a lot easier for Rick to merely dismiss it as yet another journalist hater who hasn't written a sitcom and therefore has no valid opinion.

[mars bah bah bah]

True, but Life's Too Short and Ricky are intrinsically linked; he's always poured a lot of himself into his TV shows and I don't think it's unfair to connect them as this article has.

But yeah he'll definitely just dismiss it.

[ColmDawson]

The Huffington Post review is pretty much spot on, I think. Reading the comments, it is baffling to think that there are people who rate LTS higher than The Office.

[RandyChimp]

He'll find it difficult to dismiss the huffington post review, since he keeps going on about how great the huffington post is.

[stjimmy]

The Huffington Post review is pretty much spot on, I think. Reading the comments, it is baffling to think that there are people who rate LTS higher than The Office.

I know exactly the types of people who would rate it more highly than the office. I leant my office dvds to one of my old colleagues a few years ago, He was a head chef, He watched the first 3 episodes and thought it was boring rubbish. I urged him to borrow them again but he said no point, he'd never put himself through it again. This made me angry, but another chef pointed out that the guy I leant the dvds to actually did have some of Brents trates, not as bad as Brent, but enough to make him think that Brent acts quite acceptably.
LTS is much less subtle than the office, plenty of slapstick. My ex colleague would love it. After all he loved last of the summer wine.

[Iago]

Lot's of people have seen only a few episodes of The Office or not seen it at all, or perhaps not seen it in a very long time (5 maybe 10 years) so there's not this relentless comparison that we all have - I think I rewatch The Office and Extras about once a year.

So most people aren't as fresh on the older stuff, and I'm sure this has an impact because they don't appreciate the bar-setting standards of The Office, they never did or they can't remember them.

[Clive]

Metacritic is starting to compile reviews. http://www.metacritic.com/tv/lifes-too-short/season-1/critic-reviews

Relatively favorable review from the New York Times (!) Critic lauds Warwick's performance.
http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/arts/television/lifes-too-short-on-hbo-has-warwick-davis-and-ricky-gervais.html

[stjimmy]

Metacritic is starting to compile reviews. http://www.metacritic.com/tv/lifes-too-short/season-1/critic-reviews

Relatively favorable review from the New York Times (!) Critic lauds Warwick's performance.
http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/arts/television/lifes-too-short-on-hbo-has-warwick-davis-and-ricky-gervais.html

Had a feeling the Americans would like it a lot more than we do.

[Brent Hogwell]

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/wilson_02_12.php

The Literary Review is not a place I expect to come across RSK references but a review of Cruelty & Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century By Simon Dickie, a book about how 18th-century humour was a bit less than PC, concludes with the following:

Or perhaps our malicious impulses are satisfied in much the same way: in the year that Cruelty & Laughter was published, the English rugby team attended a dwarf-throwing contest in a New Zealand bar and the BBC showed Ricky Gervais's latest series, Life's Too Short, in which, weeping with mirth, we see a dwarf actor tumbling out of his four-wheel drive and finding himself unable to reach his own door bell. As Fielding put it, 'Now the Humour, or Manners, of this Age are to laugh at every Thing.'

[ScottHanson]

But if Eastbound is what happens when you invest in idiosyncratic imagination, Life’s Too Short is the result of flattering it until it festers into pure ego. On The Office, Ricky Gervais minted a particular strain of awkward, observational humor with his clueless character as the deliverer of all the (wonderfully) bad jokes and the butt of all the best ones. Now, he’s fobbed off David Brent’s puffed-up self-regard and mockumentary humiliation onto the tiny, non-load-bearing shoulders of Warwick Davis. Best known as the lead in Willow — a justly forgotten fantasy film that, bizarrely, also gets a shout-out in next week’s Eastbound — Davis stars in this misguided Brit-com as a venal, desperate version of himself. Freed from beneath a suffocating cloak of Ewok fur, Davis reveals himself to be a good sport, but his show isn’t nearly as charming as he is, swinging clumsily between cheap size cracks and sub-Office cringes. Worst of all is the presence of executive producer Gervais himself, no longer the source of any comedy, but floating high above it, a smug arbiter of disdain and craven celebrity trolling. Seated strangely behind a glass desk with writing partner Stephen Merchant, the increasingly intolerable star is still preening, only we’re not meant to laugh at him, merely with him at all the terrible, desperate people who arrive at his office like penitents hoping to wash their feet in his BAFTA-riddled Ganges.

That some of these A-listers deliver, such as an outrageously deadpan Liam Neeson, hoping to tackle comedy with the same bullheaded intensity usually reserved for hunting deadly wolves, is practically beside the point. (It’s also, judging by Johnny Depp’s breathless cameo in Episode 2, an outlier.) If Ricky Gervais merely wanted to make funny videos with his friends, he could use Vimeo like the rest of us. By shoehorning these backscratching sessions into a series ostensibly about Warwick Davis, it reveals how barren this shtick has become, too obsequious of celebrity to mock it and too dependent on it to make a show without leaning on it like an attention-grabbing crutch. More than ever, Eastbound shows us how an asshole can be hilarious. Life’s Too Short starts with a formerly funny comedian and then pulls the same trick in reverse.

[CantSayBien]

ouch