We haven’t seen much of Rowan Atkinson since 2018, when his third Johnny English film failed to set the box office alight. Now, though, he is back, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, starring in a glossy new comedy for Netflix.
Atkinson plays Trevor, an accident-prone house-sitter tasked with the upkeep of a mansion “that, for maximum audience reach, could be anywhere from Surrey to Kazakhstan”. Just as he’s settling in to the job, a CGI bee turns up, unleashing chaos. Over the next hour and a half – spread over nine episodes – every “painting, book and piece of furniture” is trashed, which might be jolly to watch if the show were funny; alas, it isn’t.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
It is perfectly enjoyable, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. But it lacks “the genius of Mr. Bean”. The set pieces are almost too slick, and the series feels as though it has been “precision-tooled to deliver a satisfying customer experience.”
Well, I loved it, said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. Yes, the bee is “woefully undercharacterised” (why does it torment Trevor?); and various high-end brands get rather too much screentime. But Atkinson knows that the best comedy isn’t “tragedy plus time, but stuff plus idiot” – and here he is at his comic best.
-
6 homes for entertainingFeature Featuring a heated greenhouse in Pennsylvania and a glamorous oasis in California
-
Film reviews: ‘Jay Kelly’ and ‘Sentimental Value’Feature A movie star looks back on his flawed life and another difficult dad seeks to make amends
-
6 homes on the Gulf CoastFeature Featuring an elegant townhouse in New Orleans’ French Quarter and contemporary coastal retreat in Texas
-
The vast horizons of the Puna de AtacamaThe Week Recommends The ‘dramatic and surreal’ landscape features volcanoes, fumaroles and salt flats
-
The John Lewis ad: touching, or just weird?Talking Point This year’s festive offering is full of 1990s nostalgia – but are hedonistic raves really the spirit of Christmas?
-
Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
-
Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
