In IFC, ‘F’ also stands for fun
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While television drama tends to concentrate on a few subjects (crime, disease, family dysfunction and combinations thereof, sometimes involving aliens and/or monsters), comedy can be about anything at all. This coming week, the Independent Film Channel, not adhering religiously to its name, offers three new unpredictable series, two British imports and one straight out of Brooklyn.
“Ideal,” one of the imports, premieres Sunday; the pun contained in its title is the one obvious thing in this strangely peopled but finely observed downbeat farce about a pot dealer and the people who pass in and out of his messy apartment. Huge and hugely disheveled actor-comedian Johnny Vegas (“Bleak House”) stars as Moz, a man of large appetites but little ambition (and even less hygiene), a subsistence-level pusher who mostly recycles drugs confiscated from other dealers by his best friend, a police constable. (Like Mary- Louise Parker‘s character on “Weeds,” he doesn’t deal hard drugs or sell pot to kids, which gives him baseline acceptability.) The comedy of despair and dissolution comes more naturally to the British than to Americans somehow -- it might have something to do with the Blitz or our own fear of being contaminated by squalor. From the two episodes available for review, it’s difficult to know what sort of show it means to be -- there are realistic domestic details, yet there is also a man in a mouse mask -- but it has finished five seasons in Britain, and a little research reveals it will be surprisingly eventful for a series about people who spend a lot of time stoned.