Gavin & Stacey and the trouble with sitcom revivals

Ruth Jones, Mathew Horne, Joanna Page and James Corden in Gavin & Stacey in 2010

A final episode of the comedy series “Gavin & Stacey” will air on Christmas Day, James Corden and Ruth Jones have announced.

“It’s official!” wrote the actor and former chat show host on Instagram, “we have finished writing the last ever episode of ‘Gavin and Stacey'”.

It will hit our screens five years after the most recent, one-off instalment of the series and a full 14 years after the third series ended. But as many writers have discovered, reviving a comedy long after its heyday isn’t always met with praise.

‘Bad cover version’

The 2015 reboot of “Arrested Development” left some feeling that the show was best left where it was. “Trying to recreate the past is almost always impossible”, said Vox, and the show felt “half finished”. It was “fun in places and laboured in others, sometimes in the same scene”.

“The show must not go on,” said Entertainment Weekly. The episodes were a “low point for the once-great series, recycling gags, reheating limp characters” and “swirling complicated narrative strands without the old snappy grace”.

Released 13 years after “The Office” ended, the cinematic reboot “David Brent: Life on the Road” could “never quite escape unfavourable comparison to that first, unimprovable finale” and “mostly feels like a faint photocopy of what we’ve seen before”, said Empire.

This “bad cover version”, said The Guardian, was a “patchy comedy that lacks discipline”. Variety said it was “meandering”. Not so, said The Telegraph, Ricky Gervais was “at his toe-twistingly funny and poignant best”.

‘Grave-robbing’

The idea of the 1970s BBC prison comedy “Porridge” without the “comic brilliance” of Ronnie Barker “would have once been unthinkable”, said Digital Spy. But, 39 years on from its last episode, the writers “struck gold” with Kevin Bishop, who played the Barker character’s “cyber-criminal grandson” in 2016.

But The Guardian wasn’t so happy. “This will tarnish the memory of the original”, it said, and “some things are best left as that – a memory”. The one-off revival of another Barker sitcom, “Open All Hours”, also fell flat for some and “felt like a sad relic from another era”, said The Telegraph.

Perhaps Corden and Jones have less to worry about because when “Gavin & Stacey” returned for a Christmas special in 2019, it pleased many. “Those with fond memories of the original will find the goods they ordered,” said The Independent, while The Guardian said it was “absolutely crackin'” and Den of Geek said it was “full of love and laughs” and “back at its best”.

But some will never been won over to the television reboot. “Resurrecting the dead and buried” has “always been part of television’s business model”, but in the past few years, “the grave-robbing industry has blossomed”, said Vice in 2016. “Stop rebooting TV shows, you lazy ***holes.”