Clever, funny and sweet comedy about struggling Shakespeare
This is a very smart, funny and sweet comedy about Will Shakespeare as a struggling writer, actor, business- and family man. It has clearly been written and created by people who know and love Shakespeare's work.It is certainly more enjoyable the more you know about the man and his work, but I think it can be funny regardless. Those who aren't hardcore fans of the bard may particularly appreciate the other characters' complaints about how Shakespeare expresses things in an unnecessarily complicated way ("But it's what I do!") and about how the jokes in his plays require extensive footnotes for anyone to be able to enjoy.
I must also mention that I love the fact that this Will regularly goes home to Stratford to spend time with his family - and perform the tasks on his wife's list of "dad jobs". Anne Shakespeare here is hardly Will's intellectual equal but she is kind and caring and thankfully not the shrew that misogynist academics have been trying to make her out as for the past few centuries. Feminist Germaine Greer believes Anne was the rock on which Shakespeare relied throughout his life, and I think this is how "Upstart crow" portrays her.
As a non-British Shakespeare buff, I sense that there are some jokes about contemporary life in Britain that go over my head, though I still enjoy things like the jokes about the British rail and the annoyingly small number of lavatories for women in theatres. The actor who plays Will Kempe seemed oddly familiar but thanks to the late IMDb boards I was able to find out that this is because he is doing an impression of Ricky Gervais, whose career, one could argue, has some similarities to Kempe's.
The first couple of episodes are in my opinion the weakest of the first season, so please stick with it! Can't wait for season 2.
score 9/10
the_reminder 4 March 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3653541/14496
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