I wanted to like "Warren". The BBC's new prime-time sitcom stars Martin Clunes, the ever reliable funny-faced favourite and the advertising leads the viewer to believe that the show is going to be Clunes playing a grumpy, self-righteous driving instructor.
He snarks, he rolls his eyes, he makes sarky comments, and it all seems rather funny. I was looking forward to tuning in.
And there is some grain of truth intact from that trailer - Clunes does indeed portray the titular character Warren as a grumpy, self-righteous driving instructor. Unfortunately, the characterisation doesn't stop there, though. After 1 episode of the full show, it becomes immediately apparent that Warren isn't so much grumpy as he is a misanthropic sociopath and he isn't so much self-righteous as he is a completely unbearable bastion of ignorance.
That the writing team made the title character around which the whole sitcom is based so utterly unlikable to the point that he actually comes across as an abusive narcissist with controlling tendencies is perplexing.
The characterisation of the protagonist is so egregiously grating that I felt the show was deserving of a blog post - merely as an example of how NOT to write a character.
Why is my reaction so extreme? Well, to begin with, Warren is perpetually pissed off - with everything. Everything from his two stepsons (whom he almost invariably refers to as "tosser" or "wanker" in every breath), to his wife (who he eyerolls his way through his conversations with) to his work rivals (who he relentlessly and baselessly slanders).
I've heard many people comparing this to Victor Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave and Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers. The problem is, Warren has none of the righteous anger or vulnerable charm of these characters.
Victor Meldrew is not merely a grumpy bastard, as many vacuously characterised him as when the show first aired. No, Victor Meldrew is a sane man in an insane world. He lives an existence plagued by petty criminals, shysters, cruel employers, cruel rich people, muggers, inconsiderate and ignorant neighbours and (topping it all off) he experiences extraordinary runs of terrible luck.
Thus when he explodes "I don't BELIEVE it!" the audience laughs not just at him, but with him. When Victor is screaming at someone for failing to fix his car for the third month in a row, or raging at a car turning up dumped in a refuse skip he hired, we laugh because we understand his frustration.
Similarly, when Victor is wrong about something or crosses a line, he is frequently ashamed or apologises - a humanising and endearing trait that drives the more serious dramatic scenes of the sitcom too.
Once again this pattern is repeated with Basil Fawlty. He is rude, obnoxious and at times even aggressive towards people - but he is charmingly pathetic and vulnerable too. He is dominated by his equally obnoxious wife Sybil, his hotel is a rather crappy establishment despite his best efforts to improve it and he has hilarious delusions of grandeur, erroneously viewing himself as a member of the upper class rather than the jumped up working class man he really is. Again, his weaknesses are painfully human.
Warren, by contrast, has no such virtues or human flaws. He is merely unpleasant to everyone else in the show all the time, for no reason. Most of those he hurls abuse at are nicer or more likable characters than he is! And we are, somehow, supposed to laugh.
"Dad, can we get broadband?" His stepson asks patiently in one episode.
"Don't be such a NERD." Warren retorts. Ha. Ha. Ha?
Warren is also just a complete dick with his actual actions in the world too. In Episode 1 he decides to fly-tip a ton of rubbish out of the back of his car.
In most shows a protagonist doing something immoral like this would result in his embarrassment or humbling and a change in his or her character. Not in Warren. He is arrested at the end of the show but is as defiant, smug and unperturbed as ever...and it's never mentioned in the next episode.
When we see Warren giving driving lessons, he outright abuses his students. He tells one guy to "Piss off" and dumps him out of the car just because the guy raises a fair complaint, and then spends his time forcing another kid to drive him to a garden centre and pay for the privilege. This is the same garden centre where he abuses his stepson's boss and screams at him unpleasantly over a discount until he is dragged from the store.
I wish I was making this up. A reminder: this is supposed to be a comedy. This is the protagonist of said comedy. A man who just acts like, for lack of a better word, a complete c*** for the entire show for no reason.
On top of this God-awful soulless characterisation, the show actually has a total lack of internal consistency and bad writing across the board too. This tired joke of Warren somehow being the only man still on dial-up internet is followed by his son accessing several websites very quickly in order to further the (excuse for) plot. Because apparently 56k is indeed just as fast as broadband in this universe, and the writers don't even care that it shouldn't be.
A good show would show Warren getting ironically frustrated at the slow internet in this scene, and have his son mock him for not upgrading. Therefore, of course, the show doesn't do this at all.
Perhaps the most cringeworthy example of the terrible writing is Warren's wife, Anne. First of all, it's implausible that Warren is even married to her. He has literally no redeeming features, so it's beyond bizarre that she married him in the first place.
Secondly, Anne is just written as thick to the point of caricature. She is so dense (and portrayed in such a constrastingly dozy, gentle tone) that it becomes unbelievable that she has enough neurons to remember to breathe.
For me, the moment the show became unbearable was when Warren "ran over a cat" in Episode 2.
He's driving down the road with Anne in the passenger seat (fully awake and aware I might add) when he slowly drives up to a dead cat lying in the road. At this point Warren gets out and picks it up, suddenly and uncharacteristically turning into a big soppy animal lover full of sadness. This jarring transition of his character is so out of keeping with the rest of the show I was sat waiting for the sarcastic punchline that never came. The writers cannot even write Warren as a kind character convincingly!
However, then comes the most idiotic moment of the show. A family comes out and assumes Warren has killed their cat by running it over. Warren protests. Anne then pipes up, and admonishes Warren for running the cat over.
This isn't just Anne making a single mistake of perception. She repeatedly and stupidly utters to the family that they will pay for the cat, since Warren ran it over. SHE LITERALLY SAW HIM DRIVE THE CAR SLOWLY OVER TO AN ALREADY DEAD CAT. She was in the car two seconds ago seeing all of this! How the fuck does it make any sense that she now thinks her husband ran it over?
Truly the laziest writing I've ever seen in a sitcom. They sat around a table, decided the joke was that Warren gets wrongly accused of running over a cat, someone explained "But that doesn't make any sense, because Anne knows he didn't do it." and then someone else waved their hand and said "Fuck it, just say that she saw him run it over for some reason."
In conclusion, Warren is a textbook example of how not to write a protagonist and how not to write a show. If you want to see Martin Clunes starring in what could sadly be a career-truncating car crash I recommend it, but if you want a show that keeps the wheels on the road I recommend you park this one in the garage.
