Hunderby

The show hinges around crude humor and an absurd level of cruelty towards the generally useless protagonist. While often forced and awkward, the show does make use of it's otherwise clunky and unnatural pace to make amusing meta-jokes that let the tempo seem intentional.

If you can handle a show that falls back on displays of melodrama and grossness to launch most of its jokes, (though intermingled with witty one-liners), you'll likely find this hilarious.

Was gutted that sky didnt renew this for a third series, it's a fantastically twisted comedy from the great Julia Davis, everything she does is superb in my opinion. It's wonderfully witty an expertly written with a very adept cast.

I'm an American who loves Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Maurier...the kind of books (and movies) that helped create the tropes this show mocks relentlessly and hilariously.

You get such tropes as: the perfect and incomparable dead wife, conniving housekeeper, huge terrible secret, clueless vicar, physically wretched but eternally optimistic and naive character, deformed villain, straight man with curiously close male servant - the list goes on and on. The show isn't "cruel," it's making fun of the stereotypical characterizations gothic novels loved to use to create tension. And some of those characterizations were based in really messed up ideas from the 1800-1900s, like that ugliness was an external reflection of evilness or bad character, or that virginity was the most important attribute in a wife (who cares who she is as a person?). It's making fun of the ideas in those stories that are abhorrent or cliche to us now.

In the first episode, Helene is set to marry a much older pastor, and he tells her that if she wasn't entering the marriage as a virgin, he would of course have to stone her to death by his own hand 😔. I laughed out loud and was hooked from that moment.

But it's probably not funny if you don't know the stories it's mocking, because satire relies on familiarity with the subject matter. It's "dumb" humor in the vein of Scary Movie, Walk Hard, Hot Shots, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Blazing Saddles, etc. The jokes are rooted in all the OTHER media you've watched and the stereotypes they're built on.

If you've ever wished Young Frankenstein could have a baby with Wuthering Heights, this one's for you.

Quotably funny, great production values in this lampoon of English village life during peak empire. Brit costume comedy has sometimes been under the spell of Python, but Hunderby is very much its own show, marking out fresh terrain with really accomplished comic performances and writing and direction. Conceits such as 'Bird Raymond' and 'Bubbly Milk' stay with you. The second series is darker, and the tonal shift may appeal more to some than others. Further series would be very welcome and, now that it is some years down the track, there would a new audience to add to the many current fans of the show. The UK continues to produce innovative or thoughtful comedy (Episodes, Fleabag, Defending the Guilty) and Hunderby is an instant classic. The trailer includes some great tasters of the very funny performances, and the Vicar's dance shows the fine comic control the creative team brings to this show.

I could see shades of Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Tom Jones, Wurthering Heights, and several others. I'm sure there were others that I just haven't read, so could not appreciate the spoof.