When my wife heard that I was going to be reviewing the British TV show Men Behaving Badly, she said that it was like shooting fish in a barrel - they all behave badly. While she does have a point, it's still funny to watch a pair of bachelors with no tact living on their own. The program, which started airing in 1992 on the BBC, eventually made the leap across the pond and was remade in America. It was broadcast on NBC for a season and a half starting in 1996. This newly released DVD set includes the first two seasons of the original ITV production. While only 12 total episodes the first half is quite entertaining, though the show does take a nose dive in the second season.

The men of the title are Gary, who owns a condo, and his slacker friend Dermot who is renting a room. Dermot hasn't paid the rent in a while, but only because he can't keep a job. As the season starts Dermot is down in the dumps because his girl friend has just dumped him, and Gary is thinking about breaking up with his girlfriend of two years Dorothy. Of course things don't go the way Gary plans when it comes time to actually ask for his keys back, and when he finds that Dorothy has a "friend" who she's interested in, he starts thinking that he might have made a mistake. Meanwhile the upstairs flat gets sold to a beautiful woman named Deborah which leads both men to fall over themselves trying to impress her. The fact that she has a boyfriend who is working in Singapore doesn't seem to bother them at all.

I was really impressed with the first season. The shows were funny, with the humor coming mainly from Gary and Dermot's exaggerated, but fairly believable, behavior. When Gary proposes to Dorothy that they should both feel free to see each other but still sleep together, he's originally excited that she agrees. His enthusiasm soon turns to jealousy though, as he realizes that this arrangement leaves Dorothy free to sleep around too. Soon he's making a list and asking her to check off the men that she'd be willing to sleep with, and getting rather angry about it. "I'm just a little bit surprised that you wouldn't say 'no' if King Juan Carlos of Spain asked you back to his place for a game of bury the sausage!"

Another great moment is when Dermot tells Gary that doesn't believe Dorothy's excuse that she was tired because she'd been up the night before playing chess with her friend Graham.

Dermot: When you first start seeing someone you just can't stop playing chess with each other can you? You meet to go to a movie, have a quick game of chess before you go, then you rush back afterwards and have another game, possibly in the show when you're both all soapy. Then in the morning you play with each other's pieces again, even if you've already woken up in the middle of the night and wopped your bishop out. Then you see her bending over to do her shoes up and you can't resist giving her a right good chessing before she goes.

Gary: So you're saying they've slept together?

The thing that makes the first season so engaging is that there is a good amount of continuity between the episodes, something that most sitcoms don't have. Over the course of the season Gary's relationship with Dorothy changes and Deborah comes to realize that Dermot's only interested in getting inside her pants. This continuity makes the characters more three dimensional and real and makes the show more humorous to boot.

Another thing I really liked was the fact that the actress who plays Dorothy didn't look like a super-model. She was pudgy and not particularly attractive. You could see how Gary would be attracted to the girl upstairs, while still wanting the comfort of a solid relationship. I really get tired of Hollywood movies and shows where the 'ugly girl' is gorgeous. Willow from Buffy is a prime example. They wrote her character as if she was unattractive, but the actress playing her wasn't.)

As I said, I really liked the first season, which makes it that much harder to state that the show really goes down hill in the second season. In the opening show Gary finds out that Dermot has fallen for a girl and they are going on an extended motorcycle trip around the world. That means that Gary has to find a new roommate and after several interviews he decides on Tony, because his business card says he's president of a record company. What Gary doesn't realize is that Tony's 'company' is just a dingy booth that sells used records. Tony is just as vacuous as Dermot, but a little better looking,.and both Deborah and Dorothy take an interest in him at first. Tony has eyes for Deborah of course, and makes several plays for her, but she finds out what a jerk he is before any of them work.

There are several problems with this second season, the main one is that they've gotten rid of the continuity. Deborah finds out that Tony's a conniving, lying, ne'er-do-well in the first episode, but she seems to have forgotten it and has to learn the lesson over again several times.

Where the first season had two continuing plot, Gary and Dorothy's relationship and Dermont's attempts to bed Deborah, this season cut it down to just the guys trying to shag the girl upstairs. This was a mistake, because the shows started having all the same feel to them. The jokes were very similar, with Gary saying something that was complimentary to Deborah but insulting to Dorothy in her presence just about every show.

The new co-star doesn't do a lot for me either. Dermot was a slacker, but Tony is just an idiot. Too much of the humor relies on Tony doing something mind-bogglingly stupid. In one show he and Deborah are about to actually sleep together, when he states that he's glad she's no longer sexually repressed, which is what he and Gary had decided was her problem. This of course sends her off in a huff. Not only was that unbelievably dumb, but it wasn't even funny. It was just an out for the writers, not a funny joke. It's too bad that such an enjoyable show could go down hill so quickly.

Audio:

The two channel audio is adequate though it wasn't incredibly dynamic. The dialog was easy to hear, and there wasn't any drop outs of distortion. It fits the program well. There are subtitles in English.

Video:

The full frame picture had a few problems. There was a fair amount of aliasing and parallel lines were wavy. This was particularly bad with Venetian blinds. The image was otherwise pretty good. The colors was fairly bright, and the picture was sharp. Overall an acceptable picture.

Extras:

Each of the two disc has a reel of outtakes, about 15 minutes all together.

Final Thoughts:

The first season of this show, available separately, was very funny and well worth picking up. The show was paced well, and had a good sense of humor. Unfortunately the second season goes down hill and loses a lot of the charm that the first shows had. I recommend that people pick up the first series, but skip the second. If you're really interested in both years, you should rent it first.