Benji Wilson

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is both quite clever and quite irritating, but it fails to save the sitcom because it is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Not in this reality, anyway.

In its first few episodes, The Hawk seems content to play down the same fairways that those two comedies [Stick and Happy Gilmore 2] did. .... About half-way through the 10-part series it’s as if the writers were told about all the other golf comedies out there and started looking for a point of difference. What they hit upon is a family estrangement story, and they manage to spin it out in to something you might even call affecting.

It’s evanescent froth, useful only if you want to try and pick up some Japanese or make some juvenile guff gags.

Here are the characters you’ve come to love in the situation in which you’ve come to love them. No monologues or bottle episodes or dialogue-free mood-board vignettes; no celebrity chefs popping up because they can… just a classic recipe done very, very well.

The central mystery is solved in the series finale and I doubt that you’ll guess it, partly because the writers have successfully strewn so many red herrings about the place, and partly because it’s the most stupid plot reveal in living memory.

These are all stage-managed catastrophes, as they have always been on Clarkson’s Farm. The thing with a stage-managed catastrophe, however, is that if it is managed well enough, it’s still very funny.

The writing is tack-sharp and the ensemble is full of underappreciated comic performers.

It is television as X-rated pantomime. And it is hugely entertaining, just like the first series. It works because the writers and actors are canny throughout.

It is a little gem (lettuce pun intended).

The series crackles with a tension born of not knowing where simmering resentments will suddenly erupt, while being absolutely sure that they will. And they do.