Rhys Darby is one of those comedy actors who, even if the name doesn’t automatically ring a bell, you’ve most likely seen in something. On the small screen, he’s surely best known for his supporting role in Flight of the Conchords as Murray, the inept manager who handles the band on the side of his day job at the New York branch of the New Zealand tourist office, whilst movie fans may know him for his brief but memorable cameo as leader of the werewolves (not swear-wolves) in What We Do in the Shadows. Short Poppies, an 8-part comedy series from 2014, puts him centre-stage as he plays a succession of characters living in a nondescript New Zealand coastal town, where filmmaker David Farrier (a real-life journalist, so I’m told, appearing under his own name) is putting together a documentary series. It’s a promising idea, and makes for around 3 hours of harmless fun, but all in all I’m sorry to say it left me feeling that Darby is perhaps best utilised in a supporting capacity, dealing out his distinct comedic persona in smaller doses.
Farrier (who has more than a bit of Louis Theroux about him in look and manner, which I should imagine is no accident) is the main constant throughout the series, each episode seeing him spend a couple of days in the company of a new oddball played by Darby. We have an extravagant lifeguard, who’s a proud longtime winner of the Sexy Legs contest (Darby does sport some impressive stems, to be fair); a narcoleptic conspiracy theorist who claims to have survived alien abduction, and is anxious for them to come back for him; a squeaky-voiced fish and chip shop employee trying to set up his own business leading whale-watching tours, despite his complete ignorance of the field; a curtain-twitching conservative 60-year old woman, with a very vocal interest in local affairs; a park ranger with an interest in survivalism; a single mother car park attendant, with aspirations as an artist; and a cut-rate lawyer and muscle car enthusiast, anxious to pass off his customised Datsun as a vintage Ferrari.
While each episode tells a self-contained story, there are little subplots which run throughout, mostly involved Mike (Jonno Roberts), local policeman with a penchant for short-shorts, whose troubled romance with Georgina (Georgia Hatizis) plays out across the series. Darby often pulls double-duty as well, with the characters occasionally making brief appearances in one another’s stories, before – in what must have been a logistically difficult episode – every one of them appears in the series finale (Darby even plays an eighth character, a TV executive, in that one). The whole set-up isn’t too far removed from that of Coogan’s Run, the series Steve Coogan made in the mid-1990s in which he played a new character in each story, with a few overlaps here and there.
However, much as Coogan’s Run didn’t really establish a set of new characters strong enough to keep us from eternally associated Coogan with Alan Partridge, nor does Short Poppies leave me feeling there’s necessarily much more to Darby than Murray of Flight of the Conchords. The problem is, when you break them down there isn’t necessarily much to distinguish the characters; in every instance, the humour comes primarily from their total lack of self-awareness, and flagrantly unrealistic self-image. Each story also tries to work in a bit of pathos, as the characters find their ambitions distracting them from the things in their lives that really matter. Perhaps if it was a couple of episodes shorter, this wouldn’t have felt quite so repetitive. Above all, though, the key problem with Short Poppies is that, while it may muster a smirk or two, it’s very rarely laugh out loud funny, and this is a pretty major concern for a comedy show.
Still – I’m saying this having watched the entire eight-episode run back-to-back with my reviewer’s cap on. The front of the DVD reads ‘as seen on Netflix,’ and while I myself have never run across the show on that popular streaming service, I can envisage that being a good home for it. (Strikes me as a very odd thing to splash on a DVD cover, though… I mean, if it’s on Netflix, and more and more people are subscribing to that now, wouldn’t the viewer be more tempted to look it up there than purchase the hard copy?) As undemanding viewing for a lazy evening, most playing likely in the background whilst thumbing through social media, Short Poppies will no doubt be just fine. But I should imagine most of us hope for something a bit more than that in a TV comedy series from a performer whose work we’ve greatly admired elsewhere.
Short Poppies is out on DVD and digital platforms on 29th May.