Peep Show Series 6 DVD review

The sixth series of Peep Show has been and gone and now, in plenty of time for Christmas, comes the DVD release. This sixth series sees Mark and Jeremy anguish over who’s the father of Sophie’s baby (the series’ main story arc), the workers of JLB stage a protest rally against the closure of the company, Mark gets closer to the lovely Dobby and Jeremy finds love of his own in the form of Russian neighbour Elena.

Continuing where the fifth series left off, Mark and Jeremy have a much closer friendship than was portrayed in those earlier episodes where Jeremy’s disdain for Mark was quite apparent. This adds to the show’s dynamic, lending some humanity among the chaos. The acting is uniformly excellent with Robert Webb and David Mitchell having developed a chemistry that’s hard to beat on TV right now. The superb Olivia Coleman as Sophie is back, as is Neil Fitzmaurice as Jeff (albeit fleetingly) and the return of Dobby from series five and the introduction of Elena fit well into the Peep Show universe.

Credit for how strong this series is must really go to writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong who consistently bash out witty storylines and brilliant one-liners, most notable in the hilarious finale to the series which, as I stated in my review of the episode at the time, is one of the funniest five minutes of television I think you’ll see this year.

Peep Show is rightly regarded as one of our finest television series of the decade and the very best thing about series six is that it opens things up nicely for an already-commissioned seventh. Superb.

Extras

One of the better sets of Peep Show extras yet with a belter of a behind-the-scenes feature that runs at over twenty minutes, out-takes, deleted scenes and an animated feature on how Peep Show is made. The behind-the-scenes feature has the usual ‘We all had a great time’ snippets but then it does genuinely appear that they are having a great time, so that’s fair enough.

Unlike many DVD ‘behind the scenes’, however, this one doesn’t outstay its welcome and is just as fun as watching an episode as, while it does inform about the production process, it does so in an entertaining manner, largely because the actors involved are just as funny off camera, so it would seem. Best bit? Watching how the kissing scenes are carried out. Cameraman Nick takes much of the credit.

The animated feature is a little odd, truth be told. It’s a little like watching a music video, taking you through the production process of the whole series and while it’s well put-together it is still quite bizarre.

The out-takes are fine, but far too short and made me beg for the day that comedy series’ extras are all treated as well as the excellent Spaced discs way back when. Better are the two deleted and extended scenes which are worthy inclusions on the disc including more insight into why Elena was considering dumping Gail (she doesn’t make as much bread as before) and Dobby’s cracking solo music performance at the JLB get-together – very Billy Bragg.

Finishing things off is a ‘If Peep Show was filmed before a live audience’ feature, which shows just how awful the show would be with laughter in the background and applause for the introduction of characters and new scenes and so on. It’s a rather witty feature but you wouldn’t watch it more than once.

Episodes:

Disc: Peep Show  Series 6 is out now.