Featured TV on DVD Review: Life's Too Short: Season One

January 13, 2013

Life's Too Short: Season One - Buy from Amazon: Buy from Amazon

Life's Too Short is the latest show created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who have previously made The Office, Extras, etc. That's a really good pedigree, but it does set up high expectations. Can it live up to these expectations?

The Show

Warwick Davis is one of the most well-known actors around having career box office numbers of over $10 billion worldwide. Not too long ago, he had a guest appearance on Extras, a show made by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The trio got talking during filming and came up with an idea for a TV show: A mockumentary centered around the actor's life with him playing a fictionalized version of himself, a very fictionalized version of himself.

In the show, Warwick Davis's acting career ended in 1988 with Willow and he now runs a not-so-success talent agency for dwarfs. He's got a huge tax bill to deal with and he's going through a tough divorce. He needs to jump start his Hollywood career to pay all of the bills he has. Unfortunately, while he has a big opinion on himself, his talent level is low. So in essence, he's playing the part Ricky Gervais played on The Office. Speaking of whom, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are regulars in the show, playing themselves. Warwick tends to go to them looking for work and through them he meets plenty of celebrities. So there are also a ton of guest appearances from big name celebrities, which the show borrows from Extras.

This brings up the biggest complaint I had with the show. We've seen this before. There's not a lot here that we haven't seen before from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. It's just a little more repetitive here and mean-spirited. Far too often they resort to a cheap short joke. This is a real shame, because there's usually something funny in every episode, and there are instances when the show is brilliant. You see this in the first episode when Liam Neeson has a guest appearance and asks Ricky and Stephen to help him work on his improvisational skills, because he wants to be a stand-up comic. Rosamund Hanson is also hilarious as his dim secretary, Cheryl.

Overall it isn't bad, but it is far from what I was hoping for.

The Extras

Extras include a 28-minute long making of featurette, 10 minutes of deleted scenes, four minutes of outtakes, and a ten behind-the-scenes clips, each two to three minutes. It adds up to more than an hour of special features, which isn't bad, considering there are only seven 30-minute episodes on the two-disc set.

The Verdict

Life's Too Short didn't live up to my expectations, there are enough funny moments that fans of Ricky Gervais's style of humor will want to check out Season One but not enough that it is worth picking up.


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Filed under: Video Review, Liam Neeson, Warwick Davis, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant