The First Team

The BBC's glossy new football sitcom from the scatalogical mind of the In-Betweeners is what you might expect. Crammed full of psychotic characters, cringeworthy awkward moments and unexpectedly bleak crevices.

It's not reinventing any wheels but by largely sticking with the three solid leads (earnest optimistic Mattie, doleful overwhelmed Jack and vain manchild Benji) it proves strangely compelling. Although with that focus you sacrifice more time with some of the rest of the cast who become somewhat abstract caricatures. Will Arnett, in particular, just seems oddly pointless here and most of the big plot beats of the series just drift past without leaving much impact. None of three have any stake in them, particularly.

I'm no football fan, but there were some interesting points within about the fan-club relationship and frankly very little actual football beyond that. Dotted throughout the six episodes you also get some excellent cameos - from interesting character comedians like Phil Wang and Tom Bell to actual Jason Williamson off of Sleaford Mods.

In its rush to both be an embarrassing character comedy and a comment on contemporary professional football, it does neither particularly well and therefore will likely never enter the premier league of decent sitcoms. It does retain a wonky charm in its three earnest leads, if it goes into extra time le'ts hope we get more of them.

First 2 episodes are utter drivel, but gets better and funnier. Last episode takes a turn for the weird though. Would watch if they make a second season.

The First Team

Definitely written for a knowing football fan audience, I think this was very funny and even more so if you are football fan.

Great comic acting, great timing, great script.

I actually really enjoyed this show. Ok it's basically the same formula as The Inbetweeners but transposed to the context of a football club. You have the same basic characters - the fish out of water geek, mr thinks he's more attractive than he is, mr nice but dim. Had it's share of cringeworthy moments but a high number of laugh out loud moments too. It's the kind of show that could improve further as it finds its feet in future seasons or could just fizzle and run out of ideas. Let's hope season 2 comes along and delivers

While the first team may have been billed off as a premiership division team, their players did not come off as responsible premiership soccer based players. Something I would like to believe the directors went for when taking into account the petulant behaviour of soccer players in the 21st century. The training base appeared to be a soccer training base found on the Welsh border and Wrexham but I might be mistaken. The show was well directed and the acting was good, especially from the older heads, but it was just very enjoyable from the soccer aspect of things. It just appeared to miss that spark. An amicable effort however.