Peep Show

You don’t watch sitcoms. I know. The setup, the catchphrase, the bit where everyone turns to camera and the studio audience does the laughing on your behalf. It’s filmed theatre, and you’ve seen the shape of it from the outside and decided it wasn’t for you, and honestly, most of them aren’t.

Peep Show is.

Here’s the formal trick, and it’s the whole engine: the camera is the character’s eyes. Literal first-person POV. When Mark is talking to someone, you’re looking at them through Mark’s face — and over the top, you hear what he’s actually thinking, which is never what he’s saying. He’s saying “great to see you” and thinking a spiralling, self-justifying catastrophe of a monologue about how this interaction will define him forever. Then it cuts to the other person’s POV and you hear their thoughts, which are about something entirely different. Every conversation in the show is two people having completely separate internal experiences while performing politeness at each other. You have been in that conversation. Everyone has. Nobody else had the nerve to film it.

And because you’re inside their heads, you’re complicit. Mark Corrigan — David Mitchell doing career-best work — is a loan manager, a financial milquetoast, a man who describes himself as “the MP for rivers of fear”. His flatmate Jeremy is a lazy, feckless musician who talks about himself like he’s the protagonist of a better show. Neither is the hero. Both are the narrator, in turns, and both lie to you through their narration. The joke isn’t what they do. The joke is the gap between what they’re doing and the elaborate story they’re telling themselves about why it’s fine.

This is British shame comedy at maximum density. Not charming shaggy-dog mistakes — actual moral cowardice, pettiness, and need, escalated until it physically hurts. Mark leaving his own wedding through a window. Jeremy ruining every friendship he’s ever been offered. Super Hans, who is a warning about a man. Nine series and it never softens, never gives you a warm ending, never lets either of them learn anything — which is the point, because they can’t, because the entire comedy is that they can’t.

There’s a cynical mechanics-level read here too, and it’s a good one: the format is cheap to shoot and the POV conceit means the show is structurally impossible to remake with a laugh track or an American cast without losing everything. It’s not a sitcom that happens to be British. It’s a formal experiment that ran for nine years because it kept being funny.

If you like panel shows, you already like Mitchell — but this is better than his panel work, because the format lets him do the full internal spiral rather than the perfectly-timed flourish. Start with series one, episode one. You’ll know within five minutes whether it’s yours.

It’s yours.