h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was watching Misfits last night and I was struck, as I have been a few times in the past couple of years, how the two best British dramas have been made for 'yoof' channels: Being Human and Misfits.

E4 (home of Misfits) and BBC3 (home of Being Human) are pretty much universally slated because most of their output is either dreadful "reality" TV shows or repeats of American shows (in E4's case the repeats are of Scrubs and Big Bang Theory so it's not all bad) so these two seem a bit anomalous because they're both high quality drama.

It's also quite interesting how many similarities the two programmes share, apart from the channels they're on. They could both be described as darkly comic melodrama, both are ensemble pieces with a young, mostly unknown cast, and both are a novel take on established memes (Being Human takes on ghosts, vampires and werewolves while Misfits takes on superheroes/superpowers). Both manage to be very artistic with quite a small budget and new directors/crew.

My love for Being Human is well-known: I have a journal entry about it that's at 200+ posts (Clive and Ictoan have helped with that) but it's such a strong character piece with 3 extremely good young actors. The use of music and sets is incredible and they manage to get a lot done with minimal CGI (Death's Door is perhaps the best example of this). The most recent series was my vote for the best British drama of the last decade. Misfits is crude and brash but pants-wettingly funny and manages to land some real emotional punches. The powers of the gang are rooted in their psychology and this is repeatedly explored and reinforced. There's a wonderful fairy-tale aesthetic to the show which reaches its zenith with the Superhoodie storyline.

If you haven't seen either of them and are looking for a new show, I can't recommend these two highly enough.

I agree with you on the merits of Being Human but I've never seen Misfits. It's had interesting reviews so maybe I'll try and catch it sometime, if I ever catch up with all the other telly we've recorded. I finally caught up to the end of the Fades today, the BBC3 take on another classic genre (zombies). Haven't found anybody else who estuck with it to the end but I thought it was actually pretty good.

MC

Well let's face it - di yoot' (to give its correct spelling) are damn smart cookies. Always have been.

I must get hold of Misfits next time I'm in that sort of shop. But then, I also need to get organised and finish watching Being Human...

I've asked for 'The Wire' for Christmas. About time!

I kept missing Misfits and now I seem to have lost E4 and BBC3 (suddenly lost a load of Freeview channels the other day) so I can't watch them aat all.

At lunchtime today I wandered into a shop for no good reason and immediately saw series 1 and 2 of Misfits in the bargain bin. $34 for the pair, which is less than the full price of a single series. Made my day, that did.

And now I'm about three-quarters of the way through series 1. I've been completely sucked in... Gosh it's good.

For the longest time it was the Young Adult books in fantasy/ urban fantasy that was really the place to be if you liked that kind of thing, I thought.

I suspect Twilight has rather ruined that. Still.