This is what we're watching: Black's Bookshop is the perfect sitcom that makes despair funny

In the new series Articles every week I talk about which films and TV series amazed me. Today we'll talk about the sitcom.

Finding a good and original sitcom is a difficult task. Sometimes it’s not only the banality of the plot that scares you away, but also the lengthiness. "Black's Bookshop", filmed from a script by comedian Dylan Moran, delights with original characters, non-trivial plot and brevity - only 18 episodes were released, so the viewer does not have to fight his way through self-repetitions.

Any good sitcom is all about characters, and Black's Bookshop does that well. Bernard Black is an alcoholic who hates his store, but he doesn't want to look for something else to do. He is generally against changes in life: when they clean out the bookstore, he loses his temper. Manny works for him - he's clumsy extrovert, any attempt to help a person only multiplies problems. And the owner of the neighboring shop, Fran, is the same as Bernard, but she has very little faith in the future, and therefore tries to support Black.

Dylan Moran explainedthat the idea for the sitcom came after he saw a sign in a small store that said “Please put the books anywhere because we have nothing better to do than put them back in places." He was struck by the futility of owning a small bookstore.

And so the comedian put despair into the hero, indifference and cynicism. While delighted customers talk about their favorite novels, Black suffers from a hangover and waits for the end of the working day - and when he can’t stand it, he simply kicks out the customers and closes. He's already pissed off that they went inside, ignoring the "Closed" sign at the entrance.

"Black's Bookshop" romanticizes losers, whose lives are going downhill, but that doesn’t stop them from having fun. Even if we are talking about cheap wine and meaningless conversations, they have no money or energy for anything else. At the same time, Black is no stranger to simple joys, but in moderation. In one of the episodes, he argues that he would really like to have a girlfriend for the summer who would wear a light dress, but with the clarification that he would leave her in the fall.

Of course, many of the show’s jokes are predictable—it’s a sitcom, after all. However, the originality of the characters and the eternal craving for the absurd, characteristic of all Dylan Moran's projects, turns Black's Bookshop into a truly funny series. And the bet on the comedians playing the main roles is completely justified: Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey are great at delivering jokes, even if they are not very funny.