In a season littered with sophomoric new sitcoms (Fox’s “Dads,” CBS’ “The Millers”) and failed dramas (NBC’s “Ironside,” ABC’s “Lucky 7”), Hollywood could learn a lot from the new British series “The Wrong Mans.”
The show, debuting Monday on Hulu, can’t be boxed in. One minute, it’s a comedy about mistaken identity and misguided decisions; the next, it’s a fast-paced crime drama with murder, gun fights and chase scenes. Created by actors Mathew Baynton and James Corden while they worked together on the 2007-10 UK hit “Gavin and Stacey,” it’s also packed into 30-minute episodes — a limit normally reserved for sitcoms.
After Sam (Baynton), a timid small-town government worker, witnesses a horrific car crash, he answers a ringing cell phone — seemingly ejected from the vehicle — by the side of the road and hears a man say, “If you are not here by 5 o’clock, we will kill your wife.” They’ve got the wrong man.
His needy colleague Phil (Corden), harboring delusions of grandeur, convinces Sam that they should rescue the nameless kidnapped woman. The mismatched pair turn into the wrong men, plural, for the job — or “mans,” as the offbeat, deliberately misspelled title says.
The results are harrowing, hilarious and genre-busting.
“We had this conversation about big box-set dramas like ‘24.’ We were talking about the stuff that we loved — and how none of it happens in comedy,” Baynton recalled in a recent interview about how he and Corden first brainstormed the six-episode hybrid. “They don’t do cliffhangers, they don’t do high-stakes drama, they don’t do cinematic production values. Why should that just be in drama? Wouldn’t it be exciting to do a comedy that way?”
It’s “24” meets “The Odd Couple,” as Sam and Phil get much more than they bargained for. They are alternately kidnapped by thugs and turned into hostage-takers themselves; witnesses to a murder for which they’re immediately framed; and mistaken for skilled spies despite being the most inept versions of Jack Bauer imaginable.
Baynton, who turns 33 on Nov. 18, says the outlandish premise had to be relatable. “One of the questions that drove the writing was, ‘What would we do?’ ” he says. “It’s true to what everyday heroism tends to be. When something awful happens, people who by pure chance just happen to be there will always say, ‘I just did what anyone would.’ ”
Director/producer Jim Field Smith says a comedic foil like Phil, who sees the kidnapping as a massive opportunity, adds punch. “He says, ‘This is brilliant. Stuff like this never happens to guys like us.’ That’s kind of the hook for the show, really,” Smith says. “For Phil, all of his Christmases have come at once.”
But Baynton says he and Conden knew that action would only gel if it held up on its own. “We went into it going, ‘Imagine if something looked amazing and had dramatic thriller aspects but was really funny,’” he says. “We had to plot it as a drama as well. It has to work regardless of the jokes.” (Broadway fans will remember that Corden won a 2012 best actor Tony for the play “One Man, Two Guvnors.”)
They also avoided sitcom-ready slapstick. “One of the rules that emerged is that the comedy should never come from those two making idiotic decisions. It’s funny because of how extreme the situation is,” Baynton says, adding with a laugh, “Watching them suffer those circumstances is almost masochistic.”
Smith, who previously directed several installments of the Matt LeBlanc UK comedy “Episodes,” thinks the genre-crossing show is a good fit for Hulu, which, like the BBC, welcomes content that doesn’t fit into a neat demographic or mold, he says. “They just allow program makers to make the best possible show they can,” Field adds. “That’s what we’ve tried to do, really — to just make the kind of show that we would like to watch.”