Californication Insider

It was only a matter of time before David Mitchell was given his own comedy quiz show, as he’s proven to be the perfect panel show guest (QI, 8 Out Of 10 Cats), a great team captain (Would I Lie To You?) and decent guest-host (Have I Got News For You?) already. The Bubble finds Mitchell as master of ceremonies, but it’s perhaps more enticing as a concept than it proved to be in execution. Three celebrities are put into the titular “bubble” with no access to a television, the internet or their mobile phones. Wouldn’t “Under A Rock” have been a better title? After fours days, the celebs (Reginald D. Hunter, Victoria Coren and Frank Skinner in this opener), are brought to the studio and have to answer questions posed by Mitchell about current events they missed, essentially having to guess which news stories, TV reports and headlines are true and which are false.

Like I said, it sounds like a great idea, but there were a number of problems that prevented The Bubble totally living up to expectations. For one thing, most of the news stories were so obscure or regionally-focused that you didn’t really need to have been denied access to TV and tabloids to play the game. This was likely intentional so that audiences could play along at home (to an extent), which I can understand, but it still felt like it limited the fun. And is four days enough time to keep the celebs media blind? Admittedly, The Bubble’s format means it must be relatively expensive to book guests, who have to essentially give up the majority of their week to participate, so perhaps a full week living together just isn’t practical.

A lot of The Bubble’s success rests on a variable utterly beyond its control, too: what happens in the world. I’m sure there’ll be occasional episodes where something monumental happens while the contestants are locked away (a major crime, a natural disaster, a famous death, birth or marriage, etc), and those episodes will certainly be more enjoyable to watch. That said, it’ll be interesting to see how The Bubble tries to elicit comedy from tragic news events like the Haiti earthquake, or if they’ll just avoid what’s genuinely been dominating the news. They’ll probably just stick to fun “human interest” stories (like the cat with a can of Whiskers stuck on its head in this first episode), for fear of causing offence. The BBC have already had a sense of humour failure in refusing to create fake news stories to air on the show, which The Bubble amussingly managed to comment on.

But, y’know, I was expecting something a bit ballsier. I guess we’ll have to see how things develop and how they tackle potentially “darker” episodes when the guests are blissfully unaware the Queen’s been assassinated, the population of France were all wiped out in a plague, or Tony Blair was sent to jail for war crimes.

Better comedy through lovable buffoonery and complete obliviousness made Ricky Gervais (and frequent comedy partner Stephen Merchant) famous. It might have started with 2001’s “The Office” and continued with HBO’s “Extras,” but Gervais has since shifted his attention from TV to film, live shows and even stuffed animals.

Since 2001, Gervais and Merchant have been behind a recurring series that landed them in the Guinness Book of World Records for most-downloaded podcast. That show found its muse in producer Karl Pilkington, a laconic sad sack who quickly became the centerpiece of the show.

So here is HBO’s latest Gervais partnering, a live version of “The Ricky Gervais Show” podcast. And that’s all it is — the podcast, but in animated form — which means the trio stride into a soundproof booth, sit down and begin talking as their live figures slowly turn into animated ones. The animation (by Wildbrain, home to “Yo Gabba Gabba,” among others) blends elements of Hanna-Barbera simplicity with Genndy Tartakovsky and is colorful and surreal; Gervais, for example, resembles Fred Flintstone’s toothier, shorter cousin.

But there are problems from the start: The static nature of three talking heads (even in cartoon form) is dull, and the intermittent non-studio interstitials used to illustrate the discussion fail to provide enough of a change. Watching cartoon characters laugh at one another feels recursively silly, and not in a good way. (Truthfully, the real-life people on the show are far more animated than the 2-D cartoon characters can ever be.)

But the main issue is that this show is not really about Gervais, or even Merchant. It is the Karl Pilkington show, because the essence of all content involves Gervais or Merchant prodding Pilkington into sharing his odd theories about the world (for example, nothing worthwhile was invented post-1900), then turning into his sneering, slightly hostile peanut gallery. Gervais even calls Pilkington a “little round-headed buffoon.” This makes Pilkington seem the kinder person in the room, and the tone rings wrong.

Perhaps “Ricky Gervais” could have worked as a series of five-minute YouTube segments. As it stands, there’s not enough variety and too much focus on the one person most people turning on HBO have the least interest in. Come back, Ricky, and quit laughing at Karl. The audience prefers you as their buffoon, so they can be the ones doing the laughing.