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Upstart Crow: “Star Crossed Lovers”

Well, if nothing else, the British comedy series Upstart Crow taught me to appreciate more fully the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, which also tried to combine the irreverent humor of Blackadder with the work of the Bard. I never realized how subtle much of the humor of that movie was until I saw this mess.

And yet I can't feeling that writer/creator Ben Elton was onto something with this TV show even though he had a bad habit of getting in his own way. Part of the problem, of course, is that poking fun at Shakespeare is hardly a novel achievement. Writers have been satirizing the Bard of Avon for centuries; the notion that he is still ripe for humor made me wonder where exactly Elton has been all this time. Nor does it help that most of Elton's ideas don't work as well as he thought they did. The Ricky Gervais parody got old fast. So did the constant comparison between Shakespeare's transport woes and modern-day transportation problems. So did the show's tendency to poke fun at its own pretentiousness. Elton's work on Blackadder wasn't always flawless but its highs were much higher than this show's highs.

Still every so often it had its moments. Just not as often as I'd like.