Plus One One Love (2009– ) Online

It has been some time since Rob Black was dumped by his girlfriend Linsey in favour of her new boyfriend, Duncan from Blue. He is now sleeping on his sisters sofa with all his possessions smelling of sewage (due to a pipe explosion) while she is endlessly happy and in love. When Rob gets an invitation to their wedding, he knows that he is only going to look like a failure compared to Duncan from Blue – particularly when he is unable to fill the "plus one" part of the invitation he has received. Rob decides to find someone so stunning that everyone will be focused on him and his date.

Plus One was one of several of the Comedy Showcase pilots in 2007 that got picked up into a full series. The pilot for this series was not quite as smart as I had hoped but was quite enjoyable for having the celebrity culture as part of it. The series itself was not something that inspired me but was something I was curious enough about to see how it took this one-shot idea and made it into 5 episodes. Well, the answer to that question turned out to be "by doing the same thing each week". This is not a criticism though, just a note that the show stuck to the formula of luckless Rob being motivated by spite, getting into misunderstandings and scrapes each week. OK, no problem so far.

The problem is the same as in the pilot – it just doesn't have enough edge or really consistent laughs about it to make it be more than OK. And this is what it is – OK. It is not the anti-Christ as some have suggested and it is not "wonderfully funny" of anything like that. It is consistently amusing at best, with a scattering of laugh-out-loud moments here and there. The formula doesn't vary much but too often it is an effort to get to the "wacky" events and, as others have said, it does feel like a less interesting, less funny, less intelligent and less astute version of Peep Show. The celebrity aspect of it is not that well done – Duncan (from Blue) creates a fun cheesy and perfect personae but he is not a great actor and even a slight demand on him falls flat. Snowdon and Jamelia are nice to have but don't have great material.

The main cast mostly offer potential. I'm not totally sold on replacing Kinnear with Mays. The former was pretty good, the latter is not that good at comedy on the basis of this. He is too keen to pull faces and mug his way through, which often gets tiresome rather than funny. Harman, Oliver and Shepherd are really good in small roles that are quite funny and form a good base for the show – shame it cannot build on it.

Plus One ends up being an OK show that did OK from its 5 episodes. Unless it does something new though I cannot see any reason why it would come back for a second season because it is not really more than serviceable and did little to mark itself out as anything other than amusing.