Clungens and Dragons

A list of TV shows that at one time I rather liked:

Heroes
Prison Break
24
CSI
Family Guy
Scrubs
The O.C
Chucklevision
Joanie Loves Chachi

And now I fear that The Inbetweeners will soon be added to that list. When The Inbetweeners hit our screens in 2008 is was a breath of fresh air, kind of like Skins but good. I say that but I only watched Skins the one time and it felt like an expensive episode of Hollyoaks trying too hard to be cool and not capturing anything remotely realistic about my adolescence. We can’t all have grown up making films with Hugh Grant.
The Inbetweeners on the other hand wasn’t trying to be cool, it was trying to be funny, and it succeeded. It wasn’t totally akin to how I remember school but that didn’t really matter because the interaction between the four protagonists was often amusing and to an extent a realistic depiction of four teenage boys. Mix that with some embarrassing situations and you have quite an entertaining show.
Unfortunately the sharpness and wit of the first series (at least I remember there being some sharp wit) was mostly gone by the start of the second, replaced by a relentless barrage of crude obscenities. Saying clunge the tenth time is not as funny as the first time. The embarrassing situations are still there however, but they seem to be relying on them more and more as the series progresses, and if these situations don’t work, the episode generally fails. They don’t always have to be vulgar and disgusting either, Frank Spencer never got his dick out in public.
I was part of a four strong group of “inbetweeners” at school, the geekiest part though, and I no doubt dramatically lowered the coolness of the other three. Looking back I was punching above my weight, I still am. School was endlessly awkward for me, and usually consisted of trying not to get an erection, inevitably getting an erection, being too shy and embarrassed to talk to anyone, mocked for being shit at football (wasn‘t even that bad), bullied for being small and quiet, and insulted by my own friends. It was never about really embarrassing situations you could base a sitcom around, it was a culmination of all the little awkward things that made school so hard and humiliating, and maybe this is just me, but I spent most of my time narrowly avoiding embarrassing situations every day, possibly even every hour, rather than actually having them.
The Inbetweeners should in my opinion focus on the smaller things that make adolescence such a nightmare because the bigger things like shitting yourself in an exam or exposing a testicle in front of an audience don’t happen in real life, if they did you would never go back to school, you’d probably jump off a bridge.
The characters in The Inbetweeners have become very two dimensional. Jay, against all odds is the most realistic character in the show, there were dozens of people like him at school endlessly talking about sex, overcompensating for the fact that they weren’t having sex, as if everyone expects a 13 year old to be “knee deep in clunge” and you've failed at life if you're still a virgin before your SATS. I never understood that need to show off your (fake) sexual affluence. I remember one time in year 9 maths that someone said that a tit wank is better from a woman with small tits. Totally useless information for a 14 year old like me, or for the cunt who said it, I don’t even know if he was right either (answers on a postcard please). Another time in what must have been year 7, someone said that a woman should never be at the bottom of a 69 because they would choke. I absolutely hated these people, who wouldn’t?
Simon has the neurotic sensibilities that I assume a lot of people once had, or still have, which in a way helps you empathise with him and makes his experiences totally relatable. Will and Neil are probably the weakest of the four. Once you get that Will is intelligent, a square, and hates idiots, and that Neil is just an idiot, there’s not much comedy to come from them, and while Jay might be realistic, he says the same thing over and over, and it’s getting pretty tiresome now.
With the interactions between the four protagonists becoming much weaker and repetitive, it’s a shame there is such a little ensemble to mix things up, it’s like they go to the world’s smallest school. Any recurring characters are also quite two dimensional often showing only one personality trait, Donovan for example is supposedly hard, and every time he’s on screen we know exactly what he’s going to say.
Of course I’m the minority here, the show’s popularity seems to be at an all time high, probably because it’s so crude and Jay says minge and clunge a lot. It will only get more popular the more it uses mindless profanities because there are so many people who talk like that out there. Peep Show proves that you can be rude and intelligent at the same time and make something as small and simple as walking down a street or dancing as one of the most embarrassing things in the world. The problem with The Inbetweeners is that it’s sinking too low too fast, how is it going to get worse for them? Awkward moment after awkward moment only numbs the whole experience until it no longer seems that awkward. And we find things embarrassing because of what people will think of us, and as the cast of the show is so small, we cannot see the repercussions of their actions to the fully embarrassing extent that would happen in real life.
While the show may still have its moments now and again, the direction it is taking is not ftw (as geeks would say), maybe not for its audience, but for me certainly. With two dimensional characters, clunge, clunge, fucking clunge, and relying on the sit rather than the com, The Inbetweeners is not the show it used to be.