The Thick of It

The Thick of It follows the byzantine plotting of a minister and his advisors as they chase good press, respond to bad and try not to lose their jobs.

Visually, it’s fast-paced and vérité-styled. It’s also exceedingly nihilistic, with a lot of shouting and language. It can occasionally get a bit harsh with all the hostility and the jerky camera, but it’s excellently written; Jesse Armstrong and Armando Iannucci mine comedy gold from the confusion of modern, media-driven politics, using mundane, everyday bullshit as the grist. Iannucci, in particular, has a great flair for the absurd. His whimsy is often what saves The Thick of It from its excess of rage.

Hugh Abbott runs the fictional Department of Social Affairs, though “runs” is probably the wrong word. In each episode, Hugh and his retinue try to create favorable headlines for their ministry. Invariably, their scheme gets them into trouble with either party officials or the press and Malcolm Tucker appears out of nowhere to yell at them. Malcolm is the prime minister’s chief of press corps. His stock in trade is exaggerated threats made in a scary deadpan, a bit like a Tarantino villain retained by Whitehall. The first episode opens with Malcolm firing the sitting minister in a heated argument full of baroque profanity.

The plots can get pretty tangled. In the same episode, Hugh begins by leaking the plans for a new policy with “spending implications,” but does so without alerting the treasury first. When Malcolm finds out, he’s furious and calls to tell Hugh not to make the announcement. Unfortunately, Hugh finds that out in the car on the way there, so he and his advisors have to invent something else to tell the news. They settle on a speech about how their ministry is on target – doing “bread-and-butter, belt-and-bracers work” – and succeed in looking like total idiots. But nobody runs the story, so they’re apparently off the hook. Unfortunately, when they return to the office, Malcolm is waiting there. He tells Hugh that the prime minister has changed his mind – decided to go with the policy they were planning to announce.

Hugh: “What are we going to do now?”

Malcolm: “You are going to completely reverse your position.”

Hugh: “That’s going to be quite hard really.”

Malcolm: “Yes, well, the announcement that you didn’t make today, you did.”

Hugh: “No, I didn’t and there were television cameras there while I was not doing it.”

Malcolm: “Fuck them.”

Hugh: “I’m not sure what level of reality I’m supposed to be operating on.”

Malcolm: “Look, this is what they run with: I tell them that you said it. They believe that you said it. They don’t really believe that you said it. They know that you never said it.”

Hugh: “Right.”

Malcolm: “But it’s in their interests to say that you said it. Because if they don’t say that you said it, they’re not going to get what you say tomorrow or the next day when I decide to tell them what it is you’re saying.”

Most episodes’ plots are resolved by lying, betrayal, or the law of unintended consequences, but that doesn’t stop all the principal cast from overestimating their control. Even Malcolm’s plans backfire when he gets ahead of himself. Cynical disregard is no real out; eventually, it catches up with you in the news, either way. In the world of The Thick of It, the worst place you can be is thinking you’re master of the situation.

The characters’ relationships to one another reflect the theme of institutional dysfunction. Terri the civil servant is so flippant with her sound advice that it’s not hard to understand why nobody listens. Glenn and Olly give Hugh terrible advice, but he persists in an almost naive belief in their competence. Olly is a nervous poser: he cracks wise in rap slang and affects hipster insouciance, but practically twitches with anxiety. The two older men haze him and are both are taken in by him; Hugh buys the savvy pose even after he’s repeatedly wrong; Glenn takes out his insecurity on him, but can’t match the younger man for snappy comebacks. Olly, for his part, sucks up to Malcolm and gets bullied remorselessly for his trouble. Most of the people in The Thick of It aren’t getting what they want.

Fatalism is a persistent theme of British comedy, and this is some of the appeal of the show. American shows usually can’t avoid a residual seriousness about politics, because the American kitsch for its foundational legend plays such a role in the cultural narrative about politics. In The Thick of It, government is a cycle of lies and accidents. There are no heroes and no clean hands. After the debacles of this decade, that rings a lot truer to my ear than either the sincerities of The West Wing or the paranoid totalism of 24 – and it’s a lot funnier than either. If your preference runs toward less obtuse plots or less shouting in general, you may want to check out the writers’ work elsewhere (Jesse Armstrong’s Peep Show is great, and The Armando Iannucci Shows is must-see). If The Thick of It is up your alley, though, it is a rare kind of TV comedy: one that bleeds realism and rewards repeat viewing with new laughs.