If history is written by the victors, someone forgot to tell the last half-century of pop culture. For every New York Times bestseller or No. 1 hit record that faded into obscurity, there’s an equal number of box-office bombs, slow-selling novels, or flop LPs that eventually became objects of worship for far-flung fan cults. This is the problem with quantifying the worth of an art object in terms of sales figures and Nielsen ratings: Numbers don’t transmit the emotional resonance of a great song; a dollar sign doesn’t represent the true quality of a motion picture.
The number of seasons and episodes under a television show’s belt only tells part of the story as well. For years, the TV canon was formed around series that hit the mythical 100-episode mark, the syndication milestone that allowed broadcasters to program 20 consecutive weeks of unrepeated reruns. But as older, truncated shows became more readily available on home video, the reign of the syndicated giants began looking more suspect. Sure, Fawlty Towers only cranked out two seasons (or “series” as the British are wont to call them) in the late 1970s, but there are more frequent, better laughs in those 12 episodes than in the entire 100-plus-episode run of garbage like Mama’s Family. With a tradition of shorter episode orders, less frequent renewals, and characters who refer to elevators as “lifts,” the U.K. TV model is uniquely tooled for producing programs that endure far longer than the size of their DVD box sets suggest. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, for example, the sole series of which represents the unlikely, six-episode intersection of such iconic Britcoms as The Office, The IT Crowd, and Father Ted—with bits of I’m Alan Partridge and Da Ali G Show thrown in for good measure. In style, pacing, and lifespan, however, the show is closer to one of U.S. television’s most storied “one and done”s: the ABC cop-show spoof, Police Squad!
Such was Darkplace’s Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-esque zeal for a laugh that even its failure to secure a second series counts as a punchline. Purporting to be the lost TV effort of “author, dream weaver, visionary, plus actor” Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness), the series doesn’t just parody blowhard literary types like the one played by co-creator Holness—it riffs on the entire “brilliant but canceled” myth. The show-within-a-show structure of Darkplace presents a loser’s history of a lost “classic” that was lost for a reason. In pre-episode introductions and talking-head interludes, Holness’ character claims that his series was buried due to its radical nature and startling predictions, but the evidence on hand argues otherwise. The fictional Darkplace never saw the light of day because it’s terrible, and Marenghi’s just too egomaniacal to acknowledge that fact.
Consequently, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is one of the funniest TV comedies of the last decade because the supernatural medical drama assembled by Marenghi and his made-up cohorts is such a clumsy piece of TV. Holness as Marenghi plays Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D., dashing star physician of Darkplace Hospital, a collection of anonymous hallways, offices, and exam rooms besieged by paranormal phenomena. As presented in the series, Darkplace was originally produced in the 1980s, and Holness and his collaborators went to great lengths to sell that origin story: Grainy film stock and a chintzy synthesizer score (“based on melodies originally whistled by Garth Marenghi”) mark the faux-archival footage, in which co-stars Matt Berry and Alice Lowe respectively sport Sonny Crockett’s ’do and Diane Chambers’ blouses. But the re-creation gags go further than funny dress-up: co-creator and director Richard Ayoade is the show’s most consistent source of laughs as publisher-turned-bad-actor Dean Learner. Learner is so lacking in his performance that his Darkplace character—no-nonsense hospital administrator Thornton Reed—delivers the majority of his lines in solo shots. Taking an increased number of behind-the-scenes roles in recent years (directing the loose Dostoyevsky adaptation The Double as well as Community’s excellent My Dinner With Andre episode), Ayoade is self-deprecating about his abilities as an actor. The IT Crowd star and Submarine director needn’t be so modest: It takes considerable chops to play an actor this inept.
The overwritten glory of Darkplace marks Garth Marenghi himself as the show’s crowning achievement. He possesses all of Stephen King’s prolificacy and none of his media savvy; he’s infected with the prickliness of a Harlan Ellison, but doesn’t have the talent or insight to back it up. All of Darkplace is filtered through Garth’s myopic perspective, which was molded over the course of two Perrier Award-nominated (and one Perrier Award-winning) theatrical productions at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight and Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead. Like Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character and the various guises of Sacha Baron Cohen, Holness and Ayoade treated Garth and Dean as full-on personas that continued to exist after the stage lights came down or the camera turned off. When Netherhead took the Fringe’s top comedy prize in 2001, the duo accepted the award in character. In anticipation of Darkplace’s Channel 4 debut, Holness-as-Marenghi penned a characteristically blustery column for The Guardian. After Darkplace’s cancellation, Ayoade showed up in the host’s role of Man To Man With Dean Learner, welcoming Garth as well as Holness’ guitar-plucking alter ego, Merriman Weir. Many short-lived comedies die before locating their comedic voice, but Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace had a built-in advantage: It speaks a language its creators had been fluent in for years.