Dylan Moran’s stage persona throughout his career has been that of a youngish person transformed before their time into a grumpy middle-aged man. But in Stuck (BBC Two, 10pm), the now 50-year-old Co Meath comedian really is playing a grumpy middle aged man — which creates the disconcerting sense of someone impersonating themselves and not quite nailing it.
Stuck will be compared with Black Books, a cheerfully curmudgeonly sitcom that starred Moran as a — well, can you guess? — perpetually-peeved bookshop owner who only wanted to be left alone (even at the price of selling books). However, that show, which ran from 2000 to 2004, had magic to its crotchetiness — it was so over the top, cartoonish even, you could only take it as a joke.
In Stuck, by contrast, Moran plays a grey-at-the-temples advertising executive who has just been fired and who is listless and adrift in his marriage. It’s grim slice-of-life drama with a few halfhearted zingers but tangled up, as Black Books was not, in an oppressive air of despair.
Dan used to be a hotshot. His greatest triumph, he proudly explains, was a campaign featuring a “phantom sausage”. Alas, that was a long time ago, his boss tells him as he hands Dan his P45. Also, now he’s old — fit for nothing other than the scrap heap.
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But if Dan is a guy in a rut, his wife, Carla (Morgana Robinson, who played Pippa Middleton in The Windsors) is harder to pin down. She has hippyish tendencies yet is addicted to chips and quietly disapproving of her husband’s veganism (“everything in here kills you,” he says as they alight at their favourite greasy spoon, “they deep-fry the forks”.
The problem with Stuck is that when it thinks it’s being serious, it is merely banal, brimming with insights that aren’t all that insightful. Who knew life can lack direction at the business end of middle age? Or that couples often end up speaking past one another, living their lives at different frequencies?
The comedy is meanwhile all harrumphs and put-downs and there is none of the dark wit that fuelled Black Books. Moran as a middle-aged guy who has given up on life isn’t a proposition that tickles the funny bone. Therein lies the project’s fatal flaw.
Amid all this, occasionally a plot bobs to the surface only to vanish again. In an early episode, Dan’s suspicions are fuelled when a waiter seems rather too keen on his wife. He also has, in the Richard Curtis tradition, a sarcastic best mate — who also happens to be a doctor but who refuses to prescribe Dan the happy pills he feels that he desperately requires.
There is also the problem that Dan and Carla are wildly mismatched: he’s Dylan Moran playing himself in a depressing sitcom whilst she’s as outgoing as he is sour and introverted. It’s hard to imagine them getting past a first date, let alone decades of marriage.
But Moran is on to at least one thing with Stuck. Each episode clocks in at around 15 minutes — perfect for our bite-sized, where-my-phone? attention spans. Stuck is rarely funny. Goodness, though, it clips by. And in an age in which it feels we have less time to ourselves than ever, perhaps that counts for more than it should.
