Like a lot of people who think and write about television for a living, I’ve had the voice of David Simon in the back of my head for the last couple of days. And as dispiriting as it is to have that voice discount a major component of my line of work—episodic reviews—Simon made several salient points in his New York Times interview and his follow-up chat with Alan Sepinwall. The process of reviewing a television show on a week-by-week basis doesn’t make sense for every show on television; when a series is assembled in the novelistic style Simon applied to The Wire, it might be wiser to review a season as a whole, rather than devoting 1,000-plus words per week to individual chapters. Until there’s a fundamental shift in the way television shows are delivered, however, that’s going to be the most effective way of beginning and fostering the discussion about those shows.
Which leads me to Life’s Too Short, a series that, on the surface, has little in common with The Wire aside from the conduit that brought both into American living rooms: HBO. But thanks to The Wire (and its counterparts in the “holy trinity” of HBO dramas, The Sopranos and Deadwood), nearly every series presented by the network carries with it an expectation for long-form storytelling. This doesn’t end at dramas: Sports documentary series like 24/7 seek to capture their subjects with a breadth and depth missing from sports coverage on commercial networks; the first season of Enlightened, an HBO series that deftly straddles the lines between comedy and drama, satire and social commentary, slowly developed themes and characters that felt lacking in the early episodes, only to bring them all together into a fascinating whole by the season finale. The first seven episodes of Life’s Too Short all aired after Eastbound & Down, an outrageous comedy that presents its episodes as chapters in the tell-all book about Kenny Powers’ professional comeback. As such, viewers shouldn’t have expected all of Life’s Too Short’s pieces to be in place when the show made its Stateside debut in February. The show was building toward something larger than seven individual misadventures in the life of Warwick Davis. It should’ve been obvious it was shaping an arc for its protagonist: a steep personal decline with countless embarrassing bumps along they way.
In hindsight, I was too rough on the show’s first episodes. But I didn’t have any idea about the larger story of Life’s Too Short; all I had to go on were those early chapters, and as standalone stories, they’re flimsy and overloaded. They attempted to build the world in which the rest of the season would be set—the professional and personal circles occupied by Warwick Davis—but felt exhausting as a result. As the season proceeded, the show pared itself down: Detours with celebrity guests fell away, and a tighter focus formed around Warwick’s growing debt and looming divorce settlement. Eventually, a comedic perspective and flow was fixed: Let Warwick build himself up, then watch as the world knocks him down—or leaves him hanging from a bookshelf.
The winningest element of the seventh and final episode of that first season is how the show has whittled away its bulkier, busier elements. There are no lengthy, inessential detours with showbiz acquaintances in this half-hour; there are no inexplicable digressions into matters of faith or painfully obvious digs at Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s critics, either. Instead, there’s just Warwick, finally at the bottom of the hill with no one to support him but his incompetent accountant/lawyer and his terminally disinterested assistant. He scotches his final Hail Mary attempt at restoring his fame—appearing at a charity gala held by Sting—and is reduced to sleeping in a dresser drawer in the spare room at Cheryl’s mom’s place. In terms of putting a capper on the tragicomic arc of the first season, the episode’s a success. Even the cameo by Sting manages to duck the cheap “Look who it is!” nature of previous guest appearances by giving the character a clear, organic connection to Warwick. The gala isn’t some shoddily thought-out excuse to stick a familiar face into Warwick’s undoing—it’s an agent of that undoing.