As with every modern Cunk project, Cinema operates in two basic lanes. On the one hand, we have deliriously weird, joke-filled monologues that Morgan delivers while strolling around various documentary-bait locales, laying out a history of filmmaking shot through with absurd one-liners, bizarre digressions, and a laser focus on deliberate mispronunciation that probably hits its pinnacle with a discussion of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic, “Batship Pumpkin.” As is usually the case with these projects, Morgan and Brooker treat their ostensible subject as mere substrate more often than not; it’s not so much that they had a bunch of specific jokes they wanted to tell about German Expressionism or the French New Wave, so much as cinematic history is a rich enough topic to support the endless detours, opportunities for wordplay, and references to the discography of Belgian electronic acts that fans have come to expect from a Cunk endeavor.
The other lane—and the reason Morgan remains one of TV’s most formidable and fearless performers—comes in the form of celebrity and expert interviews liberally sprinkled throughout the show’s six episodes. The Cunk series isn’t quite a prank show, since her various subjects—who include, in this round, Hollywood luminaries like Michael Bay, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Project Hail Mary composer Daniel Pemberton—are aware they’re talking to a comedy character. But Morgan remains so skilled at delivering the world’s dumbest questions with complete sincerity that we still get to watch the surprise and shock wash over her victims’ faces, whether it’s film critic Mark Kermode—forced to weather questions about “Stanley Cupboard’s 201” or Al Jolson’s “The Jizz Slinger”—or Die Hard screenwriter Stephen E. De Souza, who Morgan works determinedly to break by repeatedly showing him AI slop videos, while enthusing that she’s now just as much a filmmaker as he is.
Those hoping for harsher focus on modern film “making” technology from the mind behind Black Mirror are likely to be out of luck with Cunk On Cinema, though; although the series takes a few potshots at Big Tech’s encroachment into Hollywood in recent years, the series is far more interested in taking a longer and more joke-filled view than anything especially pointed and satirical. The pleasure here is in the relentless absurdity that Morgan brings to bear on the topic; to say she could Cunk in her sleep at this point discounts just how much skill the comedian brings to this character, creating a vision of dour dumbness that makes for a delightful companion through pretty much any topic. (If nothing else, watching her deliver an extended, and highly scatological, story about the Halloween troubles of Philomena’s mate Paul to a gobsmacked Michael Bay is probably worth the price of admission alone.)
The worst thing we can say about Cunk On Cinema, honestly, is that we were grateful that it’s been cut into six episodes—even if they’re short enough (about 15 minutes a pop) that it’d be easy to imagine the whole thing being edited together into a single special. Watching the whole thing in a single sitting is the comedy equivalent of downing a shot glass full of Nerds; if you have an upper limit for being hit with joke, after joke, after joke, then the series is likely to slam you into it, hard. (The sheer volume can, among other things, make it easy to miss truly clever bits of writing, like a late-series aside, here and gone in the span of a second, that Quentin Tarantino’s name “is Italian for ‘five spiders.’”) The fact, though, is that there’s really nobody doing quite what Morgan and Brooker are doing with this character right now: Periodically delivered doses of incredibly concentrated absurdity, powered by a persona whose ability to say anything, to anyone, with a spirit of good-natured stupidity is impossible to beat. It doesn’t really matter what Cunk is on at this point, it turns out, when what Brooker and Morgan are still so clearly on is the top of their game.
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