Douglas is Cancelled

Very clever, deliberately disorienting four-part series from creator Steven Moffat.

It’s not perfect and sometimes very “on the nose”, but mostly it is clever and sharp, managing to nimbly shift from being farcical to serious and back again. Plus the denouement is unexpected, which is always a bonus.

The workplace-comedy trappings and quips that can make this watch enjoyable—thanks in no small part to the comical turns by Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed and House Of The Dragon’s Simon Russell Beale, who play a very unfunny comedy writer and a daffy agent, respectively—often feel at odds with the serious things Moffat is trying to say and portray.

The four-part series is at its best when exploring the more nuanced elements of a trial by public opinion and the contemporary media environment. Karen Gillan and Hugh Bonneville are excellent throughout, elevating the material – their performances make Douglas Is Cancelled a mostly worthwhile watch

Douglas Is Cancelled ends up making a nuanced point (some do wrong; others facilitate it); it’s just a bit of a flat-footed slog to get there.

The story chooses to use a metaphorical sledgehammer in place of anything that resembles nuance and rejects complexity in favor of easy-to-digest moral platitudes and an ending that feels like it’s wandered in from a different series.

The awfulness of Douglas Is Cancelled is not apparent at first, because it starts out as a decent enough comedy. .... Every single male character reveals themselves to be somewhere on the scale between dumb sexist and dangerous predator, so it’s quite some feat that the two female characters come out of this looking worse.