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The Goes Wrong Show
2019 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields, Henry Lewis
What’s the worst that could happen? A troupe of am dram actors take on some prestige productions. If you wouldn't mind ignoring the pratfalls, crumbling sets and tortured thespians ...
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3 comments on Hacker News
There are lots of examples of comedy comparable to Monty Python over the years, but with so many media outlets you kind of have to seek it out or stumble across it. Here are a few random ones that immediately spring to mind:
Green Wing [1], Channel 4 television series (UK)
Aunty Donna, Australian comedy troupe that has a lot of surrealist humour. A good introduction is this sketch [2] and their Netflix show "Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun".
The Frantics, a Canadian sketch comedy troupe. They are most known for their sketch "Boot to the Head", but their CBC radio series which ran from 1981-84 was (to me) very reminiscent of Python.
I'd imagine fans of The Mighty Boosh and Python intersect quite a bit.
The Mischief Theatre Company - the ones behind the "Goes Wrong" theatre shows, e.g. "The Play That Goes Wrong", the "The Goes Wrong Show" on BBC, etc.
Bleak Expectations by Mark Evans, BBC Radio 4 pastiche on Dickens (2007-2012) - one of my favourite pieces of comedy in any medium. Here's the first episode [3] on YouTube.
I've seen a lot of live comedy that reminded me of Python at places like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wing>
[2] <https://youtu.be/a5FGOaz__W0>
[3] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdyYQeLR1kA>
The problem isn't implementing it, the problem is making sure the implementation doesn't fuck up everything else.
In general, this implies that video metadata is immutable from the source...because the easiest way to do this would be to change the metadata. This is strange because Amazon renumbers episodes and seasons for some foreign shows (the Goes Wrong Show comes to mind).
Anyway, it seems the easiest way would have been to change the preview component to play a specified episode, then add a field and UI to set that specified episode on the series metadata (defaulting to S01E01). Then the question is, "who sets that and how?" That leads into a rabbit hole of who would actually do that, which is probably going to be different for different shows. And any human intervention in the media process will be ugly and awkward. But - since this is a human override, there should obviously be a workflow exception. So there needs to be a permission on the users and a field on the shows.
That's a couple of changes to a few different systems. How do you add a field to series metadata? How do you add a UI option to the metadata management? How do you add a permission on a user/group?
Digging in might take a week or two. Implementing the changes depends on the change control and testing requirements of the various systems. A quarter to deploy from dev to production might be accurate. In a smaller shop it would be a week or two, but Netflix needs to worry about breaking their stuff.
Humor is notoriously subjective and also dependent on mood.
The Goes Wrong Show is reliably funny for me; the premise is that a small-town serious theater troop has lucked into a time slot on a BBC channel, and they do their earnest utmost to do theatre well. But -- it all goes wrong. There's a stage version and two (UK) seasons of the show.
Whose Line Is It Anyway? typically manages a few howlingly good bits in any given show.
Key and Peele did five seasons and I get something hilarious out of basically every show, but I also think they fall flat several times per show.
Saturday Night Live has had good years and bad; they've always had a problem with knowing when to stop a sketch, but they're still worth watching, if not worth staying up for. There's a lot of survivorship bias with SNL: you can see the best bits of 45 years, and compared with that, how's this week's show going to rate?