A Powerful Sense of Dread: The Inevitable Darkness of “Peep Show” And The Voices In Our Heads
I’m very free and easy with love when it comes to sitcoms. If you let me (and some people make the mistake of letting me, especially at dinner parties) I will gush for hours about how much I love Frasier and Parks and Recreation and Derry Girls, Community and The Good Place, Spaced and Brooklyn 99 and Two Doors Down and Ghosts and Black Ops and no wait where are you going we haven’t even had the starters yet? I will watch three minutes into shows, laugh obnoxiously and declare that I would die for these characters, loudly and usually to no-one. I am a sitcom floozy: no loyalty, no commitment, but my heart is generous and full of love for all of God’s little weird sitcom creatures.
But when it comes to Peep Show, my loose tongue tightens up. Do I *love* Peep Show? Its jokes have lived in my brain since I was a teenager (imagine a nerdy little schoolboy running around yelling “It was a lampoon! A simple lampoon!” while his friends run away and you’ve got my childhood), and I’ve watched the early series so many times that some lines feel like my own thoughts (although unlike Mark, I’m usually thinking about Lyndon B Johnson instead of Stalingrad). But do I *love* Peep Show? When it comes to something so profoundly dark, so beautifully bleak, is love even possible? It’s like asking if you can love a tundra — you can gawp at its beauty, have a kind of terrified respect for its dangerous power, but love feels like an inappropriate, almost naive, reaction. Do I *love* Peep Show? Well- and at this point in the dinner party the person I’m talking to pretends they’ve got a call from the babysitter and starts scrambling for the door, yelling “LEAVE THE COAT BRIAN, WE CAN BUY A NEW COAT.”
Peep Show’s cultural legacy does fascinate me. It’s undeniably one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time: it launched the careers of David Mitchell, Robert Webb and the Academy Award winning Olivia Colman (it was either this or that Direct Line ad she did in the 1990s); one of its co-writers would go on to write the biggest drama of the 2020s in Succession; and it’s one of the most popular television shows for people like me on the Internet to quote instead of developing their own personality. “That wasn’t very Christmassy”, “Four naan Jeremy?”, “Hitler promised not to invade Czechoslovakia, Jeremy, welcome to the real world” — go onto any Reddit board and say any of these lines, you’ll instantly get at least half a dozen upvotes. Over the course of its nine series run (Nine? Nine series, Jeremy, that’s insane), it was nominated for twelve BAFTAs, winning two of them — with 54 episodes (54? 54 episodes, Jeremy, that’s insane) over 12 years (12 years, Jeremy? That’s- okay I’ll stop now), it’s the second longest running sitcom in Channel 4’s history (after Desmonds). So big was the show with some people that a throwaway joke about Jeremy selling a headline to a tabloid newspaper for when Theo Walcott turned 30 (AKA, the Three Oh Walcott millions) led to fans declaring Walcott’s birthday “THREE OH WALCOTT DAY”, hiring billboards with “Three Oh Walcott” on them to celebrate, and in one instance, an actual newspaper running the headline and crediting Jeremy Usborne with it.
But despite all this, Peep Show has never attained the monster sitcom status of something like The Royle Family, Gavin and Stacey or Ghosts. The show celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its first episode last year, but there was little on TV to mark it, only a special screening at the BFI with members of the cast. Compare that to the excellent Friday Night Dinner, another Channel 4 sitcom which ran over fewer years and series, which received a special retrospective looking back on ten years of the show and featured interviews with the cast and celebrity fans. In a world where channels and production companies are desperate to milk as much content out of popular shows as possible, there’s very little merchandising when it comes to Peep Show — no tie-in book, no talk of a cheap film cash-in, no lazy stage show, no poorly-thought through dining experience (if they do make one of these, don’t order the BBQ), no Derry Girls style mural on an apartment block in Croydon. This is not the indignant whining of a petty fan boy (although I don’t take offence if it sounds like that, I do give out that vibe), more just curiosity. What is it about Peep Show that doesn’t quite lend itself to that specific kind of fandom?
Of course, there’s a very easy answer to this, one so obvious that even dinner party guests who were halfway out the door would be compelled to run back in and yell it in my face. “Peep Show is too dark and too twisted to appeal to the idiot masses,” you scream, stuffing your pockets with vol au vents as you do so. And yes, this is a fair point. Most episodes end with Mark and Jez in the same place: miserable, alone, possibly suffering from diarrhoea in a toilet with no door while their boss watches on in disgust. Over the course of nine series, Mark gets raped, Jez joins a cult, Mark abandons his son’s birth to eat chicken and play in an arcade, Jez gets Mark to lie about a colleague sexually assaulting him so he loses his job, Mark loses his job, Jez is anally penetrated by a woman he can’t stand with a strap-on, Mark’s love rival dies mid-episode from a cold, and of course, Jez kills and eats a dog. It’s an acquired taste (the show, not dog), and most people, the argument goes, can’t handle it. After all, to quote Super Hans, “people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.”
There’s something about this answer which, although ostensibly correct, nags at me with the intensity of Mark telling Jez to use a coaster. Sure, the show is dark, but why? There isn’t anything particularly grim about the set-up, a flat-share with two idiots in Croydon, and yet there’s a kind of existential doom that hangs over the whole thing — or, to quote Super Hans again, “a powerful sense of dread”. What is it about it that gives me this kind of unsettling, queasy feeling while watching (apart from the camera angles when the characters kiss)? How does it manage to repulse and delight at the same time?
I think the answer lies in a separate but related question. It’s one that has bugged me for ages, and particularly ever since I started rewatching Peep Show while bouncing a grumpy baby (my own) at 3am for most of the past twelve months. Why has no other sitcom done the whole “point of view” perspective, where you can hear the protagonists’ thoughts? It’s been twenty-one years since Peep Show first aired with this unique, brilliant format — and no-one else has had a go at it. Why?
“Ah,” I can hear you say between mouthfuls of crabcakes, wagging a finger. “Because any show that did this would be accused of copying Peep Show.” And again, yes, I partially concede the point — it’s true that UK comedy commissioners are fairly conservative in this respect. Any prospective show that has a similar set up, format or characters to another one (regardless of how old that show might be) is shut down harder than JLB in the middle of the credit crunch. I remember in 2016 I was told that it would be hard for my hospital sitcom to get off the ground because there had already been a hospital sitcom in Green Wing, a sitcom which had ended nearly a decade ago. Despite the fact that I’ve brought this up competely unprovoked in an article eight years later, I’m actually not bitter about it all (genuinely. No, really. I’m aware that each one of these denials makes me sound more sarcastic but I really am fine with it) — simply put, audiences are less forgiving watching comedies than they are watching dramas (where “murder mystery starring John Simm as a cop who doesn’t always play by the rules” is the set up for at least four ITVX shows). People are more likely to watch comedy and do a Jeremy — watch a tiny bit of it, scrunch up their noses and say:
Why that is is for another article (and another dinner party to ruin): the upshot is that commissioners are (probably rightly) wary of drawing unfavourable comparisons with another much-admired show.
But this argument only goes so far, and only really works in the case of British commissioners. Do we really think an American channel would see a pitch for a first person perspective sitcom and say “ooh, no, there was a British show that ended nine years ago that did this, shut it down”? That’s not how sitcom formats work — they’re in a kind of constant dialogue with one another, developing and evolving between shows. Take The Office — its use of mockumentary was seen as groundbreaking (although it borrowed its filming style from American sitcom The Larry Sanders Show and the technique of “pieces to camera” from films like This Is Spinal Tap). Initially there would have been reticence about someone else doing a mockumentary sitcom, out of a fear that anyone who did would be accused of copying Stephen Merchant and whoever it was he wrote The Office with — but it was only a matter of time until the mockumentary evolved into something bigger than that one show.
The Office (US) showed that the cringe and suffocating awkwardness of the mockumentary format could be stripped out, and could create a show with a joyful ensemble cast who frequently seemed to forget that they were being filmed — ie, a more traditional joke heavy American sitcom which was more accessible than the British version. That then paved the way for an even looser application of the format in sitcoms down the line: unlike The Office (US) which will make cursory nods to the fact that this is a show being filmed (and sometimes get the camerapeople involved in the plot), shows like Modern Family use the mockumentary format as a completely functional device, where pieces to camera are clearly not being filmed for another show but are entirely just a way to book-end scenes, an opportunity for extra set-up and extra jokes. Many moments in Modern Family don’t make sense if you actually think that they are being filmed as part of a documentary — any scene that starts with the characters in bed asleep is deeply creepy because it means that the camerapeople are always there, always filming — but it doesn’t have to make sense really, because it’s an accepted format. We were all happy with every single sitcom between 1950 and 1999 only having three walls and a giant studio audience laughing between characters’ lines, so this is small fry.
Formats are malleable — dark, niche comedies with limited appeal (read: British) are often the vanguard for bigger, flashier more mainstream shows (read: American). Outside of The Office, there’s also the example of The Thick Of It growing into Veep stateside, or the indie New Zealand film What We Do In The Shadows turning into an FX sitcom set in New York. So why didn’t this happen for Peep Show? God knows the Americans have tried — there have now been five attempts at a Peep Show remake ([I know I said I’d stop earlier but] Five?! Five remakes, Jeremy?) — but the format just doesn’t translate. What’s curious is that one of the remakes (or at least one of them, I’ll be honest, I haven’t checked them all) gets rid of the internal monologue and first person perspective entirely — meaning it’s just a slovenly and sad Johnny Galecki in a horrible flat perving on his attractive neighbour. Throw in a studio audience and it’s The Big Bang Theory.
So if it’s not out of a fear of plagiarism, or for a lack of trying by more powerful people, what is it? Why hasn’t there been a version of Peep Show that strips out the social horror and the stomach churning awkwardness, and makes it more (shudder) marketable? Why isn’t there a Michael Scott version of Mark and Jez? A first person perspective with an internal monologue, but with characters who are nice? Who aren’t sociopaths? Who don’t, you know, kill and eat dogs? To be frank, can’t we just Ted Lasso this mother?
Except the more I think about it, the more this approach misunderstands Peep Show and its format entirely. What if the powerful sense of dread is not just something that hangs over the show — what if it is the show? What if the horror in Peep Show doesn’t come from its characters or its stories or even its writers, but it’s baked into the very format itself, a structural, inevitable darkness from which there is no escape?
“Wow wow wow wow,” you’re saying now, lounging on my sofa, shaking your head angrily (the last train went fifteen minutes ago, you’ve really got to make a choice about whether you’re staying or going here). “Isn’t this a bit melodramatic? Is Peep Show’s format really that unique?” And again, look, I’m a good host, I’ll concede the point. There are plenty of shows that share similarities with Peep Show’s format — Scrubs, The Middle, The Simpsons all have moments where we can hear a characters’ inner thoughts; the main characters in Malcolm in the Middle, Fleabag, Chewing Gum and Miranda talk to the audience mid-scene; the aforementioned mockumentaries The Office and Modern Family use pieces-to-camera to show provide two different faces of characters: what they’re like in scene, and what they’re like when they can’t be heard by the other characters. All of these shows do (to varying degrees) a version of what Peep Show does, in that they create a secondary layer that goes over the action where we can hear a character’s “real” thoughts (in the case of Modern Family, it should be “why are these cameramen filming me while I sleep?”).
But I would argue there are three aspects that combine to make Peep Show’s internal monologue unique: its immediacy, its lack of an audience and its relentlessness. Don’t worry, I’m going to go through each one of these like a big nerd.
By immediacy, I mean that Peep Show’s internal monologue is taking place in real time — there’s no hint that it’s being done by an omniscient narrator with foresight or knowledge of where this story goes, unlike (say) Frankie Heck’s internal monologue in The Middle. The internal monologue in Scrubs is an interesting one, as it switches between real time and omniscient — there are times when JD’s brain is just spurting out random nonsense in response to Dr Cox (who’s kind of toxic when you look back on it now), and there are times when it’s saying some insightful wisdom that sums up the episode’s themes while a song by The Fray plays. Peep Show, by contrast, is all real-time, all the time — Mark and Jeremy’s internal monologues react to what’s going on in the scene around them (often starting with the word “SHIT!”, positively or negatively), and because they have no sense of where a scene might end, they can swing wildly from one emotion to another. It’s the aspect that makes lines like “what an idiotic boob I was back ten or eleven seconds ago” work so well. There is no beginning, middle and end for Mark and Jez’s brains — there is only the now.
Crucially, there’s also no audience. I’m not just talking about the fact that there’s no studio audience — rather the fact that Mark and Jez’s internal monologues isn’t “meant” for anyone but themselves. This is actually much more uncommon than you might initially assume — by breaking the fourth wall, shows like Miranda, Fleabag, Malcolm in the Middle and Chewing Gum turn their main characters into storytellers (as do mockumentaries with pieces to camera). We’re seeing the show from their perspective, but they’re also putting on a show (no matter how subtle) to sell you on their story. They may be less guarded than they would be “in scene”, and tell you what they’re thinking at any one moment, but they’re still able to keep some distance. This is not to say they are necessarily unreliable narrators — more that on some level, subconscious or otherwise, they are aware they are being watched and judged, and make adjustments (embellishments, white lies, justifications) accordingly, so as not to alienate their audience. Peep Show doesn’t have this — these thoughts are truly unfiltered and they are not at all for public consumption, which means these thoughts can go much, much further than any of the other shows listed above.
And finally, these thoughts are relentless. Other shows that use internal monologues to provide characters’ immediate thoughts do so sparingly. In The Simpsons, the characters’ internal voice turns maybe once every two or three episodes to punctuate a gag (Bart thinking “good old rock! Nothing beats that!” before a game of Rock Paper Scissors) or act as a meta joke (say when Homer’s brain literally walks out of a particularly boring conversation with Ned Flanders about apple cider and the rest of Homer’s body completely collapses). It’s less a baked in part of the format, and more an example of how the show’s rules are elastic enough to incorporate that kind of storytelling. Peep Show cannot stop these thoughts from interrupting any and every scene, a ceaseless running commentary that witters on and on, during funerals, judging the sermon (“where did they get this guy? This is a freak show…”), while making out (“are you allowed to say when it hurts?”), even during sex (“She hasn’t said anything about my nuts.”)
With this unique format, the writers have created a kind of cheat code for themselves (which is actually really unfair — if there are any sitcom writers in Britain who don’t need a cheat code, it’s Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong.) It’s effectively an extremely efficient machine that specialises in extracting a character’s deepest and darkest insecurities and bringing them to the fore — unedited, unfiltered and unstoppable. This machine gets going immediately to bring out the worst aspects of Mark and Jez’s nature — within the first five minutes of the pilot, Mark has imagined being thrown in jail with the nonces for touching Sophie inappropriately, compared life in Croydon with the horrors of Stalingrad, and imagined a car ploughing into a group of bullying teenagers outside his apartment block. Jez meanwhile has wondered about getting a tattoo of himself on his own chest, compared himself to Leonardo da Vinci and tried to work out the logistics of having sex with his neighbour through the wall. Instantly we get a sense of the two men’s character flaws — Mark a catastrophising pessimist who secretly craves violence; Jez a narcissistic delusional layabout obsessed with sex.
These character flaws are not unique to Mark and Jez — the odd couple of uptight and lazy is one of the oldest tropes in comedy. And I would argue that Mark and Jez are not uniquely twisted or unhinged characters (at least, not here, not in Series 1). What’s unique is how their flaws have been brutally exposed by the format — all mitigating niceties have been stripped away and we are left with the pure, unpleasant instinct of the men.
It’s an interesting experiment to imagine other comic characters pushed into this format, where the audience get to (or are forced to) hear their inner most thoughts — I imagine even characters one doesn’t associate with dark comedy (think of the goofy creations of Mike Schur and Greg Daniels: Leslie Knope, Michael Scott, Jake Peralta, etc) would soon go to more disturbing, Peep Show adjacent places. They might not be thinking about Stalingrad as much as Mark, but still. This is because all good comic characters (and a lot of bad ones, too) have powerful insecurities and darkness inside of them, driving their character — Leslie Knope is controlling and desperate to be liked, Michael Scott is condescending and desperate to be liked, Jake Peralta has a hero complex and is desperate to be liked (noticing a trend here). Those insecurities and flaws act as the fuel for many of the plots of the shows — but they are also hidden, mitigated and balanced out by their actions and how they choose to present themselves: effectively, the filters that they put up that the format of Peep Show does not allow.
As a result of this format, Peep Show is inundanted with intrusive, shocking thoughts that come deep from the worst recesses of Mark and Jez’s minds: a cruel comment from Jeff provokes Mark to think about coming into the office with a Kalashnikov and 200 rounds of ammunition (“I’m probably exactly the kind of person who could end up doing something like that.”) Jez, after giving Mark enough medicine to knock him out so he can have a ‘shroom party, briefly considers how much power he has over his friend at this moment (“It’s not like I’m going to rape him. I could rape him. I’m not going to rape him.”). When Mark is interviewing Jez for a job at JLB, he suddenly has an image of what it could be like to work above him (“Jeremy could you suck on this for me?”).
Now one could argue that these are “just” thoughts, not actions. We all have intrusive dark thoughts, and they don’t necessarily mean that our lives are nightmarish. But life is not a sitcom. Usually that’s said to point out how there aren’t magic convenient solutions to complex problems that can be solved in 22 minutes, but occasionally it does also go the other way — the show is taking up valuable screentime on these intrusive thoughts, and making them central to the world. Obviously neither Mark nor Jez actually act on these impulses (and Mark seems actively concerned at himself for thinking that last one — “Jesus, where did that come from?”), but they have a dripping, poisonous effect, bleeding into the characters’ actions. On a basic level, they soften the ground for more (less horrible) horrors down the line — for example, immediately after Mark’s Kalashinikov thought, he attempts to break into Sophie’s email behind her back (which is several rungs below his first thought, but still morally dodgy).
But more than that, they also create a kind of expectation of violence and darkness for the audience — one which the show has to fulfil. To probably completely misuse the concept of “Chekhov’s Gun”, it’s like Chekhov’s Gun. If Mark and Jez have these awful thoughts, and we can hear them, but they don’t act on them in any capacity, I would argue the show would stop working — you would effectively have a running commentary of darkness which in no way interacts with the scenes we are seeing, and that would become fairly tiresome to watch. It would be like when you watch a bad movie with two plotlines that don’t actually mesh — it’s the interplay between the internal voice and the external scenes that makes Peep Show function. On some level, the in-scene version of Mark and Jez has to listen to their inner voices at all times — which means they must always be veering the show towards escalating darkness and bad decisions.
Fortunately for the writers, the cheat code of the format has another useful facet. Writing most sitcoms is like constructing a house of cards — you may want to rush to the big silly finale where the main character is covered in shaving foam with his trousers around his ankles in front of the mayor, but if the steps to get there are rushed or non-existent, the audience won’t buy it and the whole thing collapses. We need solid reasons why the character had to buy a big vat of shaving foam, and why they had to take off his belt at that exact moment, and why they needed to host a part for the mayor in the first place. You need to show a character’s thought processes, to make sure that the audience are going along with you in this journey, and to do that well it takes time.
Unless, of course, you have a format where you can hear a character’s thought processes constantly — in which case it does become a lot easier. Peep Show really can drag an audience along with their logical leaps without fearing that they’re being left behind (most of the time, at least). In “Sectioning”, the Series 3 episode where Mark and Jez have to get their friend Merry sectioned, Jez idly muses that “if [sectioning] turns out to be easy, I could get a few other troublesome people sectioned. Get Mark sectioned, get his nice big room…” As a result it seems entirely logical within Peep Show’s universe that, in the next scene, Jez would try to get Super Hans sectioned (so he can have control over the pub that they now own together). The internal monologue quickly escalates the plot in a way that would probably take a “normal” sitcom a whole act to get to — because in a normal sitcom the main character would have to verbalise that plan to another person, who would likely react with horror, and at that point the plan would probably die there and then. I would argue even a sitcom where the main character can talk to the audience would struggle to do that escalation so quickly — saying the words “I can section people to get what I want” out loud to another person (even if it’s just the audience) would sound pretty wrong, and you’d need to do a little bit more to justify it. But because Jez is thinking to himself and himself alone, he can think awful, morally repugnant thoughts — and we’re on board with the subsequent escalations.
The upshot of this is that a show like Peep Show can very easily escalate into deeply weird places across 22 minutes. Possibly the best (or worst?) example of this is the Series 4 episode “Holidaying”. NB: if you are squeamish about bad things happening to dogs, I’d skip these next paragraphs (and possibly avoid watching Peep Show) — and no judgement: writing about this episode at length did make me feel a little sick. Just come back when you get to the picture of Jez doing two thumbs up.
This is one of the most infamous episodes of Peep Show, where Jez kills, cooks and eats a dog. I’d argue it’s not necessarily the darkest moment in Peep Show, but it’s probably the grimmest, and it’s the one which tests the concept that the internal monologue means the audience will go along with everything Mark and Jez do to its limit. For this episode to work, you have to go along with a lot of logical leaps — first that Jez would accidentally kill a dog; then that he would carry the dog’s corpse with him while he pretended to look for it with its owner with whom he wants to have sex; then that he would put it in the bin; then that he and Mark would try to burn it in the forest; then when that failed, that he would take the charred remains of the dog around with him in a bin bag; then that he would go to his prospective date’s boat with the charred remains; and finally that he would eat the charred remains in an attempt to prove that it was barbeque.
To be honest, I don’t like this episode. I can appreciate the grotesqueness of it all, but on a visceral level it just repulses me, and I think, because the show is filmed with the first person perspective like a videogame, the final scene feels much more interactive than it should — the perspective makes it feel like we are not bystanders watching this scene unfold, but rather participants who are actively complicit in this. That’s just a personal thing rather than a furious moral indignation — I know this is many people’s favourite episode and I can understand why, despite myself.
On a technical level I’m not sure it hangs together — it’s the kind of episode where it feels like they had the idea for the final scene and then worked backwards trying to justify Jez getting there, rather than an organic descent into horror and madness. But the fact that the show is able to come remotely close is kind of incredible, and a lot of that is down to the internal monologue. It does a lot of heavy lifting at crucial moments in this episode — for one by justifying or explaining away some of the more ludicrous decisions (even if that’s just Jeremy internally yelling “why did I put her in the bag, I should have thrown her like a discus!”), but also by reminding us of Jeremy’s (increasingly untenable) plan (“Just keep lying till the kissing can start” and “I’ll tell her what happened immediately after I’ve come”.) One can see it as the strength of the format at the height of its fantastic, terrible powers — it has pushed the characters so far into their own depravity, to do things that they would never have thought they were capable of — and we’ve still got another five series to go.
But wait, there’s more. (I know, I know, you’ve put your coat on again, the taxi is coming in fifteen minutes, I’ll try to be brief.) These examples just show how individual episodes of Peep Show tend towards darkness. If Peep Show is Jez’s aborted Honda track, these moments are just the awful pangs of Darren’s cor anglais, piercing through an already horrific soundscape. There is a more powerful sense of dread at the centre of the whole show — less tangible, but all the more suffocating. The source of this dread is a paralysing stasis — no matter how many times Mark and Jez try to pull themselves out of this grotty little flat in Croydon, they will remain stuck there forever. That no matter how many awful situations they find themselves in, no matter how many times Jez has to go to his ex-girlfriend’s house to beg for money, or piss through a letterbox, or Mark has to shit in the woods during a paintball tournament and wipe his arse with a biography of Napoleon, they will learn nothing from any of it and are therefore doomed to repeat it, over and over.
Now at this point you might look up from the tracking app for your taxi. “That’s like every sitcom — at the end of every episode, everything resets to how it was at the beginning.” To a point, this is true — characters in all sitcoms can make the same mistakes over and over. But usually in most shows there is some level of development between series — at some point, characters grow and make decisions that push them on towards the latter stages of their life and changes the dynamic. Jake Peralta falls in love with Amy Santiago; David Brent stands up to Chris Finch; Gavin moves to Wales to be with Stacey and Smithy gets a job as a talk show host in America/becomes a naked humanoid cat. Mark and Jez, on the other hand, end the show in the same flat they were in twelve years ago, both single, arguably less well off than they were at the start. Admittedly Mark has gotten married (and then divorced) and had a child, but he hasn’t changed (and the show never really deals with Mark as a father in any serious way). They’ve both wasted a decade of their lives with nothing to show for it.
On the surface, this looks like a character flaw — there must just be something deeply wrong with both Mark and Jez that stops them from learning anything. But in fact, this is a direct consequence of the entire concept of the show — in the same way the format mines their depravity and trauma to escalate the plot, it also keeps them in a perpetual state of helplessness and ignorance.
All characters start deeply flawed — many arguably more flawed than either Mark or Jez. Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation) can’t delegate or say no; Ashley (from Colin From Accounts) is wildly disorganised, insecure and prone to push people away when they get close; Frasier Crane (obligatory mention) is pompous, elitist and neurotic; Niles Crane on the other hand is pompous, elitist, neurotic and also his nose bleeds when he lies. I would argue that all have a voice in their heads, like Mark and Jez, pushing these flaws to the surface, forming the most obnoxious parts of their comic persona — it’s just that we can’t hear it like we can in Peep Show.
Over the course of any show, these characters face situations, and their reaction to these situations is defined by their comic flaws. (Yes, yes, I know, I’m really sucking all the joy out of sitcoms right now by over-explaining this, but rest assured I do love to sit down and watch my favourite comic characters struggle through some situations.) Their reactions create worse situations, usually culminating in a ridiculous set piece which is at least partly their fault (like Leslie Knope trying to deliver a speech on an ice rink and keeps falling over, or Ashley having a nervous breakdown in an Australian homeware store because she has to buy a replacement side table for someone she barely knows because the dog she has to look after because she flashed her boob at a stranger has just peed on said stranger’s furniture, or Frasier, I dunno, having a problem at the opera or something).
At a certain point, over however many episodes, the characters learn that how they are reacting to these situations is not working — they begin to grow and develop some awareness that they have to change their actions: Leslie accepts help from other people, Ashley takes more responsibility for her life, Frasier, I dunno, stops having problems at the opera (I’ll be honest, I haven’t watched that much Frasier). Note I said “actions” and not thoughts — because as we all know (if you’ve had therapy or watched at least one episode of that show where Gabriel Byrne was a therapist, which is the same thing), you can’t really stop intrusive thoughts, all you can do is acknowledge them and deal with them in a healthy way. Growth in sitcom (and I guess in life too?) is not about changing what that voice says (ie, getting rid of one’s comic flaws), but about controlling it — learning not to listen to your worst instincts all the time. At the end of Parks and Recreation, Leslie is more at peace with herself, able to channel her determination and dedication to public service into something more productive than her scattergun approach of the early series. The voice is still there, but she can control it. At the risk of revealing how little I understand the concept of the id, the ego and the superego, she has ensured she is not ruled by her id, instead able to use it in rational healthy ways.
But Peep Show ensures that the instinctive voice in Mark and Jez’s heads can never be silenced or controlled. How can they overcome the worst versions of themselves, when the format dictates they must always listen to them, poisoning their thoughts with crippling anxiety (Mark) or hubristic self-delusion (Jez)? There is no growth because these voices cannot grow — whenever Mark and Jez crash and burn, the voices can offer no calm moments of reflection or ways to improve, only shame, hate and recrimination.
Personally, I think this is why most episodes of Peep Show end so abruptly — usually at the height of the third act set piece, moment when either Mark or Jez feel at their absolute lowest, for example watching helplessly as Jeff and Sophie go off to have sex (with Jeremy’s immortal line “what are we going to do? Go make a tent in the living room and eat Dairylea? Is that what you want? Because that’s what’s going to happen”). Effectively, they end the episode at the funniest moment, the height of the escalation: this is usually a great tactic, although it does mean there are a few episodes that just end without any kind of resolution (there’s one which ends with Jez and Mark using their ‘women’ as human shields from an angry man in a yoga class, which does feel like a cop out. Did Mark and Jez get beaten up? Did the guy just shrug and walk off?) But I do think it’s also deeper than that. In most sitcoms, after this set piece, where a character has been humiliated or ridiculed, there is an epilogue, a moment of reflection where characters, for want of a better word, learn something. It provides the tiniest glimmer of hope for a character — they are gifted awareness of their flaws and a resolution to not do the same thing again. Peep Show can’t give this to Mark and Jez, because that would mean not listening to The Voice, and that would undo the whole format of the show — so instead they are given five seconds to wallow in the horror of what they’ve just done (eaten a dog, etc) and then bam, Harvey Danger and credits. Mark and Jez are locked in an eternal state of misery with no closure, no reflection and no hope of breaking the cycle.
All of this gives the show a kind of nightmarish quality, especially in later episodes (“the longer the note, the more dread.”), which is most pronounced in Mark and Jez’s attitudes towards love. In the first few series, Mark has a relatively standard sitcom relationship with Sophie (man loves woman from afar, man makes a series of fumbling attempts to date woman, man fails horribly, man befriends a workmate who turns out to be a Nazi, etc). As the show progresses, it begins to warp out of shape — Mark realises that he doesn’t love Sophie, and his desire for a relationship comes out of a deep-seated fear of being alone and unlovable.
In another show, Mark would overcome the natural cowardice of his character and break up with Sophie — it may be painful and awkward, but in so doing he would grow a tiny bit and find the hope of a brighter future. But Peep Show can’t do that, because as we know Mark can’t stop listening to that voice in his head. Instead he accidentally proposes to her out of social awkwardness and begins a slow reluctant trudge down the aisle, towards a loveless marriage that he can see no way out of. He knows he can’t make himself love Sophie, but he also knows he can’t change his cowardly nature and break off the wedding. In the end, after a disastrous ceremony where Jez pisses on a member of the wedding party, it’s down to the heart-broken, sobbing Sophie to summon up the power to end this. It is an impossible watch — “Our wedding, the hump?!” is probably the best and most horrible Olivia Colman line in the show.
After this, it seems actively perverse that Mark should learn nothing from this four series ordeal with Sophie — that he could look at his life and not reflect even for a second about his own self-destructive behaviour. But because of the format, Mark makes the same mistakes again with Dobby — idolising her from afar, thrown into a jealous rage by the threat of a rival (swapping Jeff for Gerard), and then finding her repulsive when he actually attains her. His self-sabotage veers into paranoia — at the end of one episode in Series 8, he convinces himself that Dobby doesn’t really want to move in with him because she has some stuff in a Big Yellow Storage unit: “She’s fallen into my trap. After all I’ve done, she still invents reasons not to move in. I knew she didn’t love me. Now all I have to do is get her to admit it, and then I win. Somehow, that means I win.” At this point we’re close to fifty episodes in, and far from learning from his experiences with Sophie, far from understanding his own flaws better, Mark is doubling down, spiralling, contriving to push Dobby away, wasting another four series pursuing “The One” who turns out to be not that at all.
Like Mark, Jez cannot learn anything from the experiences with his many failed romantic partners — and like Mark, his experiences become more unhinged from Series 4 onwards. In early series, Jez is infatuated with the unattainable (he only wants Toni when she is being pursued by her husband, Tony), drawn to chaos (he systematically breaks taboos with Nancy, including one scene that has probably been pulled from All 4) and used by those he “loves” (Nancy marrying him for a green card). Later on though, these flaws become more extreme. He falls in love with a woman in a coma (a new level of unattainable), on the weekend Mark intends to propose to Dobby, he declares his love for her (a new level of chaos), and he becomes the live-in clown/babysitter/non-consensual S&M partner for Mark’s sister Sarah (a new level of being used by his partners). Jez is beaten and bruised by love (literally, in many cases), and yet every series he finds a new person to adore from afar, seemingly never realising the patterns, the awful time-loops that he finds himself in.
It’s why the final series, to me, feels a little disorientating— the show is aware that it is ending, but as there has been no progress, there is nothing to do except keep spinning its wheels. They’ve both alienated anyone who has ever loved them, and fallen out of love with themselves — and yet neither one can be allowed to give up on love entirely. They both need someone to admire from afar and ultimately come to hate. In Mark’s case, it’s an old flame — somewhat implausibly, April, a shoe salesgirl/university student whom Mark was briefly infatuated with, returns. Whether intended or not, it compounds the sense that this show has become a cyclical horror: in the same way that Mark cannot change, his prospective loves cannot either — the world is closing in, the last of Mark’s youth is gone, nothing new can grow in this soil any more.
Jez, meanwhile, falls in lust with a couple — Megan and her boyfriend Joe, for whom Jez has surprisingly strong feelings. It’s a slightly incongruous exploration of Jez’s sexuality which has, until this point, just been left rather vague — early episodes imply that Jez is comfortably bi (when told how many women Mark has slept with, he thinks “I’ve had sex with more men than that, and I basically only sleep with women”), but his experiences with Joe point to this being a potentially lifechanging relationship.
Of course, neither Mark nor Jez are allowed a “happily ever after”. After all the trouble of bringing her back, April remains The One That Got Away — Mark’s desperate, immoral attempts to break her up from his boyfriend (which inevitably culminates with the boyfriend tied up in Jez’s room while Mark tries to seduce April) fail miserably. Meanwhile, Jez turns 40, and when Joe gets him a birthday present of his “dream trip” (three months in the Med, raving all day and fucking all night), Jez has to admit that he’s too old for that. It’s a moment that one can imagine another sitcom would play differently: Jez finally accepting himself for who he is instead of the delusions he has created for himself, giving him that elusive and tiny bit of growth. As it is though, all the years have suddenly caught up with Jez and he is suddenly and horrifyingly aware that he is an old man with nothing to show for his life. Ultimately he sounds like a very tired man just giving up (“I want to come with you, but I’m just scared I might die.”), Joe dumps him there and then, and Jeremy is left bereft, as usual. The show ends with Jeremy thinking that Mark and him love each other really, while Mark thinks something different.
But a “happily ever after” in Peep Show is impossible — and the reason, simply put, is us, the audience. No matter who Mark and Jez meet, no matter how perfect for either character they might be, they will never be able to get as close to Mark or Jez as we have. We can hear every single thought that goes on in their head. We know every lie, every fear, every internal yell of “please don’t touch my floppy cock”. We know the strength of Mark and Jeremy’s feelings because we’ve lived inside them for nine years — we can never truly know Dobby’s, or Sophie’s, or Big Suze’s in the same way. This disparity, to me, is too great — you can’t create an organic, completely trusting relationship between characters which is so one-sided. The audience knows too much about one person and not enough about the other to accept that these characters can live happily together forever. This is not a slight on how underdeveloped Dobby or Sophie or Big Suze are — indeed, they are brilliant characters, superbly performed, but at the same time they are written to be at least partly unknowable, as that’s the source of much of Mark and Jez’s anxiety and frustration (panicking over what Sophie is thinking; trying to guess whether Dobby is thinking about Gerard again, etc).
This is the final cruelty of the format — its totality separates Mark and Jeremy out from the rest of the world, isolating them in subtle but inextricable ways. A show like Scrubs is loose enough with the rules of its internal monologue (is it a narration? Can the internal voice see everything? Is it immediate? Who cares!) that it can switch perspective with ease — over the years, Turk, Elliot, Dr Cox, Carla and even the Janitor all took on the role of the storyteller without disrupting the show’s format. Essentially this is because, despite the fact that the show was from the perspective of one doctor, Scrubs was an ensemble comedy — the internal monologue was used more for narration and as a device for extra gags. Peep Show, by contrast, could never suddenly switch perspective to (say) Dobby for an episode, because anything that she wondered about Mark and Jez the audience likely know the answer to. We know that Jez has wanked off to a Dungeons and Dragons book; we know that Mark has pissed in a desk at work. There is no mystery left — everyone else is allowed private, unbroadcasted thoughts, to retain a little bit of themselves, to keep their status. Mark and Jez are laid bare, their unfiltered thoughts flowing out like poison, each one chipping away at the last of the audience’s respect for them.
Personally I think this is why Mark and Jez are stuck to one another — they are both afflicted with this awful curse, to have their thoughts broadcast to an audience they are unaware of, to obey their worst instincts at all times. On a subconscious level they sense a kindred spirit in each other, even though they really despise one another (hence Jez’s haunting line “I hate living with him, but I never want it to end.”) In a sense, it is a modern day Waiting For Godot — two characters cosmically bound, who ostensibly hate each other and yet need each other to survive, in a vast purgatory (sorry Croydon) where nothing improves, nothing progresses, least of all them. I mean, sure, Samuel Beckett didn’t have a bit where Estragon pisses himself in a church during his best friend’s wedding, but that’s a quibble.
The more I think about it, Peep Show isn’t actually about two idiot men fumbling their way through life with a slightly unconventional format. It is more of a terrifying psychological experiment, a format forcing two ordinary people to be controlled by the worst aspects of their psyche, and how that will eventually consume them. I can’t escape the conclusion that Mark and Jez are not inherently bad people — or rather, they are not any worse than any of us. It is the supremacy of the voices in their heads that makes them act the way they do — they may be desperate to change, to grow, to develop, but the format they find themselves in will never allow that to happen. It cannot be fixed by putting “nicer” or “kinder” comic characters into the role of Mark and Jez — this format will find their weaknesses and mine them until they are hollow husks, pushing them inexorably towards darkness. Put simply, if you tried to put the characters from Ted Lasso in the format of Peep Show, Coach Beard would be eating a dog by Series 3.
It occurs to me that there’s probably a simpler answer to my unease about Peep Show — when it started in 2003, the idea of being able to hear someone’s inner most thoughts was probably quite taboo and exciting. Now, after twenty one years of loud, angry social media, and the rise of the hysterical right-wing commentariat, where we are bombarded by the half-baked, unedited thoughts of some of the worst people alive constantly, it feels quite tedious. Maybe, to an extent, we’ve all been consumed by a version of the Peep Show format — we all feel a pressure to voice our real thoughts about everything, to put them out into the world, unedited, unfiltered, unstoppable, and to hell with the dripping poisonous consequences.
Ultimately, I’m not sure I can say I love Peep Show. We are too close to its characters — we’re not supposed to know people that well, not even people we love. We need a little bit of distance, some little bit of ourselves that we don’t show to anyone else. Most of all, we need those happy little lies we can tell ourselves, the ones that help silence the intrusive thoughts that tear us down. In the words of Mark Corrigan:“I’m just a normal functioning member of the human race, and there’s no way anyone can prove otherwise.” The format of Peep Show lets us prove otherwise — and that’s a terrifying, dangerous power to have.
