Rowan Atkinson returns with a new character and a series to present it. Accustomed to their Blackadder, Mr. Bean and Johnny English, this time the English comedian plays an unstable housekeeper in ‘The man against the bee‘, the new Netflix comedy.
As its name suggests, the series revolves around a fact: the singular and insane combat between Trevor, a budding housekeeper, and a bee that takes peace and tranquility to a job that was initially simple.
In this sense, Atkinson and William Davies (‘Johnny English’) do not lie, presenting a series that embrace the purest hit-and-run comedy in what we see escalate this little crusade by a character who is perhaps more mentally unstable than others of the actor. In fact, while we could think of a new Mr. Bean, this one was just plain clumsy and naive.
A movie disguised as a series
I don’t know, in this world in which television and cinematographic narrative have been diluted in some way, to what extent we should enter into the debate that series are not, nor should they be, cut-up movies. in many productions the sense of the episode as a structure is being lost narrative and this is a clear example of it.
The absence of a plot B, together with the fact that the total footage barely reaches 110 minutes and that the cut between episode and episode It’s not so much between acts as between sequences (rather between gags), creates this feeling of being in front of a movie divided into 9.
Not hilarious, but funny and cute. Of these to spend the afternoon with the family either in the movies or on television thanks, above all, to the good work of Atkinson, who continues to dominate the genre and works like few others the demands of characters and stories of this style.
The problem is that, beyond the basic simplicity of ‘The man against the bee’, fiction suffers from being somewhat soft and easy in its gags. Even more than anticipating situations (for some reason the first few minutes tell you what’s going to happen next) it’s predictable. The tour of the house already tells you what is going to happen and how and that takes some of the “magic” out of situations that work accurately.