David Mitchell and Robert Webb return in the award-winning sitcom for a ninth - and final - series after a gap of almost three years. The show, set around a formerly flat-sharing odd couple, never quite attracted mainstream attention but retains a huge cult following and it is deservedly regarded as one of the best comedies around. Largely because of writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's unique gift for replicating the needy, self-deluding inner meanderings of the socially awkward mind.

The story picks up six months after Jeremy (Webb) scuppered Mark's (Mitchell) efforts to persuade his girlfriend Dobby to move in with him - with resentment still festering on both sides. But with Jeremy on the brink of homelessness he soon spots common-enemy potential in Mark's new flatmate Jerry (an excellent Tim Key). Add the fact that the once reliably psychotic Super Hans (Matt King) is attempting reform in the shape of "Sober Hans", and Mark's old boss Johnson (Paterson Joseph) has wangled him a job at a payday loan-style bank - and all the elements are in place for six final episodes of tearfully funny musings on human fallibility.

Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong on comedy endings

Peep Show has been running along on Channel 4 for 12 years. Is there anything its co-creators still haven't done to Mark and Jeremy?

Was episode one of Peep Show really a return to form?

The return of Johnson is most welcome and we're hoping he'll feature prominently in every episode. Are you hearing this, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong?

Peep Show - series 9, episode 1 review

This opening episode is basically a reset button to put the characters back where they need to be, but it's written with the elegance that cements Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's legacy. Their script nips between big set pieces with savvy dialogue that fizzes with gags and wry asides, while making viewers cringe at the appallingly self-serving antics of the anti-heroes that we now know so well.

End of Peep Show: 'Super Hans took the sofa' - video

At a Guardian Live preview screening of the final series of Peep Show, David Mitchell and Robert Webb reveal what they took from the set and we find out who got the coveted horse biscuit tin. Mitchell and Webb were joined by writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain and chair Julia Raeside from The Guardian to discuss the final series of Peep Show at a Guardian Members' event at the Greenwood Theatre, London, on 5 November 2015.

TV review: Peep Showback on top, awkward form

The joy of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's Peep Show is the way the characters vocalise internally what everyone thinks but no one would say.

Jesse Armstrong 'still terrified' by writing challenge

It was "a mixture of luck and fear" that aided the success of Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, co-creator and co-writer of the series Jesse Armstrong told the programme.

"Fear basically governs my life," Mr Armstrong said, on the subject of ending the programme, and is "still terrified" that the last lines "won't be funny enough".

The sitcom, which begins its ninth and final series on November 11, was first shown in 2003 and has since won Baftas and been lauded as the best sitcom of the decade by GQ Magazine.

Thank you, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. Thank you for providing a necessary psychological safety valve in the form of Jeremy and Mark, for allowing us to realise that our inner monologues demand we be as manipulative and shallow as those of Croydon's best worst people.

You are hard pressed to find better exemplars of modern Blighty, ones ahead of their time, than Jeremy and Mark. Jeremy the entitled egotist, whose life was singularly social long before social networks stuffed humility into a sack with bricks and dropped it into a canal. Mark, for whom the status quo is the band but what really should be preserved, the dull nag of logic to prevent a third pint on Monday night. Mark, the plug switch to Jeremy's amp.

One part of this show's genius is, like The Simpsons, its array of secondary characters, from Big Suze to Johnson to Toni to Nancy and finally to Super Hans, south London's Loki. It's the reformed caner's stag do which reunites Jeremy and Mark for the first time in six months, their combined selfishness leading to a binge and beer waterboarding. Cherish these awful, inspired moments.

David Mitchell: 'POV is a stupid way to film' - video

At a Guardian Live preview screening of the final series of Peep Show, David Mitchell and Robert Webb explain why the show's trademark point-of-view filming method was a terrible idea - something that became clear one afternoon while driving round a roundabout in Croydon...

Mitchell and Webb were joined by writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain to discuss the final series of Peep Show at a Guardian Members' event at the Greenwood Theatre, London, on 5 November 2015.

Peep Show could return in 10 years

"I could imagine coming to David and Robert in 10 years and saying, 'This is sort of a different show, but what do you think might have happened to them?' - in fact, I'd really quite like to do that," Jesse Armstrong admitted.