A truly great odd couple, to my mind, can’t simply be a study in contrasts; there has to be some underlying commonality that encourages these two weirdos to stick together beyond mere defrayed rents. When it comes to ’s Mark and Jez, that shared trait is simple: They’re two of the worst human beings in the entire fucking world. As played by long-time comedy partners David Mitchell and Robert Webb, Mark and Jez look, initially, like exact opposites: Mark as the worst possible expression of Mitchell’s tightly wound superego persona, Jez as Webb at his most id-friendly. But it’s in their shared commitment to doing the absolute worst thing in any given moment—Mark by over-thinking, Jez by under-—that the true bonds of their endlessly destructive, occasionally dog-devouring partnership are formed. [William Hughes]
