Semi-Detached review: Chaotic Lee Mack comedy goes heavy on the immaturity and slapstick

In some respects, this BBC sitcom channels elements of the sadcom – but the moments aren’t frequent or long enough to actually make us care

Semi-Detached (BBC Two) begins chaotically: Stuart (Lee Mack) is attempting to cook a welcome-home lunch for his girlfriend April (Ellie White) with their crying baby strapped to his chest when a fire alarm sounds. His father (Clive Russell) enters the smokey kitchen, towel-clad and face-masked. It’s the most peaceful moment in the episode – which ends with Stuart trapped inside a trailer, high on magic mushrooms and bottle-feeding cola to a diabetic neighbour.

The six-episode series follows everyman Stuart, a wedding DJ (or “audio visuals event coordinator”), as he navigates life in English suburbia. Each episode chronicles another of his attempts to get from point A to B, attempts which are invariably derailed by something or another. Sometimes it’s a missing iPad or a nosy neighbour; often it’s a flare-up of his IBS – almost always, it’s a combination of all three and more. For Stuart, it is “one of those days” every day.

A homely hybrid of suburban mundanity and absurdist set-ups, the BBC Two series shares overtones with Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner but goes heavier on the immaturity and slapstick: there are lobsters in the hot tub, impromptu kidnappings, cocaine mixed with ashes in an urn, a severed finger in a box of frozen waffles, and an inane amount of toilet humour. It is essentially a rapid-fire assault of jokes and shticks, some of which land and others of which don’t.

Writers Oliver Maltman and David Crow have thrown in a “real-time” gimmick for good measure, and surprisingly, it works. The absence of cutaways throughout the series does well to underscore its frenetic, stressful energy. Each 20-minute episode sees a well-meaning Stuart rushing about trying to put out fires (both literal and metaphorical) while only adding fuel to the flame. It makes for a viewing experience akin to playing a game of Jenga blindfolded in a speeding vehicle. And the car is on fire.

Mack is brilliant as Stuart, a hapless loser who dyes his beard in an effort to keep up with his much younger girlfriend. The Would I Lie To You? comedian is the series’ moral compass, his needle thrown totally askew by an ensemble cast of eccentrics and jerks: a drug-taking father who has newly discovered Grindr; his hopeless white-collar criminal brother (Peep Show’s Neil Fitzmaurice); and an ex-wife (Sex Education’s Samantha Spiro) who lives in the house opposite with their rebellious teenage daughter (Sarah Hoare) and new banker-bro husband (The Office’s Patrick Baladi), all of whom seem hell-bent on misunderstanding, disrupting, and overall distressing poor ol’ Stuart.

Some of the funniest exchanges are between Mack and White, who plays April – Stuart’s girlfriend and perennial gap-yah girl. At her instruction, he wears a dreamcatcher around his neck and grows a hipster moustache. When she recommends he sees a spiritualist, Stuart answers that “you can’t cure panic attacks with crystals”, to which April replies deadpan: “We’ve been through this… You can.”

But their funny, fraught relationship also fosters one of the sitcom’s biggest failures. In some respects, its dysfunctional familial dynamics and various midlife crises storylines channel elements of the sadcom – the growing subgenre of television making introspective humour out of pain à la Flowers and Transparent – but the moments aren’t frequent or long enough to actually make us care. “We’re happy” is an awkward refrain between Stuart and April, spoken as if it could magically will the phrase into being. The moments are touching and incisive, but too brief to be expounded on in any meaningful way, so it begs the question: why bother at all?

At its best, Semi-Detached is a totem of the old fashioned British sitcom, pleasantly enjoyable and even laugh-out-loud funny at times. But when things go south, the series can feel like a sequence of surrealist nadirs, thrown against the wall one after the other in the hope that one will stick – but to be fair to the writers, most of the time one does.