Radio Times review

Jealous studio boss Helen Basch (Andrea Savage) hates Tamsin Greig's Beverly because she thinks she loves her girlfriend Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins). Helen also hates the oily Merc Lapidus so she sets him up to do a game show with his sworn enemy, the cash-strapped Matt LeBlanc. Matt's not talking to Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly either, because the Brit abroad writers snubbed his services for their hot new show.

Packed with brilliant lines, this is an eventful episode that shows how nimbly plotted this suave, assured, knowing, skilled and very funny comedy is - and the surprising directions it can take you. A joy.

Radio Times review

A lot of heads wake up from a lot of pillows in this episode, and they all groan "What have I done?" Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her boss, the wonderfully monikered Helen Basch (Andrea Savage), face the morning after the night before - as do Matt and his ex-wife. "How much tequila did I have?" wonders the erstwhile Mrs LeBlanc. "Just enough," he replies with a smirk and his usual superb timing.

Meanwhile, Sean and Beverly are having to face the consequences (legal and otherwise) of his former writing partnership in a particularly crisp and sharp episode of David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik's transatlantic caper, which is beautifully structured and uproariously funny.

Radio Times review

Matt's money worries come to a head and you don't need to be a committed LeBlanc watcher to know that he will probably live to regret his unusual solution. Sean and Beverly face problems of their own when Sean's ex-writing partner comes to town and (in a departure from David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik's usually deft plotting) delivers a somewhat implausible missile that may sink them yet.

But perhaps the biggest bombshell concerns Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins), who discovers that her rackety love life cannot be blamed on father issues alone. As with previous series, there is mounting mayhem amid the phoniness and frivolity. And it's great fun.

You know times are hard when you've got to sell your dinosaur egg.

This is what life has come to for poor Matt LeBlanc in this comedy where he plays a ­fictionalised version of himself.

After having half his fortune embezzled by his dodgy business manager, Matt is ­devastated to discover he now has only $31million left.

Better get the violins out. No doubt his wallet's too small for his fifties and his diamond shoes are too tight. (OK, Friends geek Chandler said that first).

In this episode, the actor is told he needs to start reducing his spending and sell some of his assets (mainly property, cars and a dinosaur egg), otherwise he'll be skint by 2019.

"You spent $126,000 on a single bottle of brandy once owned by Al Capone?" asks his amazed accountant.

"Will you sell it?" Um no, he drank it.

And what about the aeroplane or vineyard? Off the table, apparently, though Matt is prepared to evict his father or fire his beach sweeper.

Meanwhile, Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig) agree to let three networks pitch for their new script.

Things don't look promising, with one wanting to cast big names, which didn't exactly work last time, and another wanting to ditch the main concept of the show. But will one be just right?

Elsewhere, Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins) finally has to confront her new boss Helen, whose husband she once slept with and consequently broke up their marriage.

Totally awkward. Especially when Carol realises halfway through her apology that Helen has no idea what she's talking about.

Episodes has so much going for it. It's co-written by David Crane, the clever writer mainly responsible for Friends! It has Joey from Friends in the shape of Matt LeBlanc playing himself, Matt, as an older, greyer and slappably unwiser version of Joey from Friends! It has Tamsin Greig! And Kathleen Rose Perkins! And it's really underwhelming!

Part of the problem must be that, while we Brits relished every last drop of the earlier battles surrounding the fictional couple Tamsin and Stephen Mangan's sharp fictional script being dumbed down for America, the real US scriptwriters might now feel a touch of possibly justifiable unease at all the shrewd Briton/whalethick Statesider gags. And thus have to concentrate on affairs, and Matt/Joey's vaulting new stupidities. But it's a fresh series, and I'll let it settle in, and admittedly Mr Mangan's facial reactions to Matt's financial woes last week - turned out he'd been scammed for half his lifetime earnings, and thus had "just" $31m left - were as pricelessly and stoically old-country as old maids cycling through the morning mists on cheap and broken bikes.

Kathleen Rose Perkins interview

I've been following Ed Miliband on Facebook. Maybe I'll get honorary citizenship after this, and at the next election I can vote!

Episodes (BBC Two) is a Transatlantic affair about a husband-and-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who decamp to Los Angeles and adapt their History Boys-esque Brit hit into a dumbed-down US sitcom starring Matt LeBlanc. How very meta. How very postmodern. How very mediocre.

The cartoonish American characters supplied the lion's share of laughs. Ageing playboy LeBlanc sent himself up gamely: vain, self-destructive, increasingly doughy but still silver foxy, with enough flashes of Joey Tribbiani to keep Friends fans happy. Daisy Haggard and Kathleen Rose Perkins were funny as face-pulling, nice-but-dim network executives Myra and Carol, with a tendency to trip over their own high heels in their scramble up the career ladder.

There were some sharp lines. Matt's battle for custody of his children was undermined by his arrest for drunk-driving. "You're the worst client I've ever had," barked his lawyer (our own Nigel Planer, putting on a ropy American accent). "I'd happily trade you for two Mel Gibsons and a Tiger Woods." Carol was infatuated with her square-jawed boss but insisted: "Obviously I would never go there." Beverly (Greig) raised a sceptical eyebrow: "Pur-lease. You keep an apartment there."

Newly reconciled Beverly and Sean (Mangan) were on the rocks again after she admitted having a one-night stand. It's this central pair that are the problem. They convince as writing partners but not as a couple. Mangan, who is normally excellent (see Green Wing, Dirk Gently) comes over like a whiny student. Greig's character is the moral centre of the show but this makes her a bit blank and boring. Their chemistry is strangely sexless. A snogging scene was faintly uncomfortable, of the sort that makes a teenager go, "Ugh, Muuum, Daaad, that's disgusting!" if their parents kiss.

Somehow Episodes has made it to a third series without leaving much of an impression. A fourth has even been commissioned. Presumably it survives owing to the star power of LeBlanc. It makes the odd sharp observation about Hollywood and the fickle nature of celebrity but feels undercooked. It's so busy smugly admiring its own cleverness that it forgot to add enough jokes.

In a nice reversal of standard Hollywood sexism, tonight's slice of this enjoyable, postmodern sitcom, sees leading-man Matt (Matt LeBlanc) under pressure for piling on the pounds. The network bosses want writers Beverly (Tamsin Greig) and Sean (Stephen Mangan) to have a quiet word ("we need hot Matt, not fat Matt"). Matt takes it predictably poorly. Beverly meanwhile has issues of her own. She's off on her first date in a decade and needs some reassurance. Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins) steps in. "They're going to give you alcohol. They're going to give you food. In two hours you're done. It's like a flight to Omaha."

Episodes, which got uproarious laughter in cut-down form at the Television Critics Association press tour in July, does not disappoint an ounce as it rolls through a seven-episode season. It also signals a savvy return to television for LeBlanc, who manages to be the butt of the joke one moment then hilariously likable the next. It takes confidence to play yourself but not really yourself and to know that moving past Joey and Friends means a simultaneous embracing/mocking of the legacy.

The premise of Episodes is simple (and all too real). Over-the-top, hug-happy, faux-sincere network president Merc Lapidus (John Pankow) meets the happily married writing team of Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) right as they've snared a slew of BAFTA Awards for their (fictional) hit series, Lyman's Boys.

Lapidus loves the series and wants it on his network. He tries to woo the duo to the States, saying the show's perfect as is and would require a mere 20 minutes of their magic to make it Americanized. They can spend the rest of their time counting the money and screwing in the pool.

So they make the leap. And, not surprisingly, it's a long drop. Lapidus wants the British star of the series that has run for four seasons to audition - despite Sean and Beverly having told him he had the job.

Turns out, Lapidus doesn't watch much TV. "There's a chance that Merc might not have actually seen your show," says Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins), second-in-command to Lapidus. "What?!" Sean and Beverly say in tandem. "I'm not saying he hasn't seen it," Carol says. "Has he seen it?" Beverly asks. "No," Carol says, shaking her head sadly.

And so it goes. Episodes was created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, the writing duo that knows more than a little something about how the industry works. (Crane wrote for Friends, and Klarik wrote for Mad About You; both wrote for The Class.) There's so much delicious fun-house-mirror truth here. When the British thespian (played with gravitas by Richard Griffiths) does the audition, Lapidus and everybody else howls with laughter. They ask him to step outside for a moment, and Lapidus says, "Is it me or does anyone else think he comes off a bit too English?" They then make him read it again with an American accent. Nobody laughs.

Episodes might be inside baseball to some, but viewers are savvy enough about real-life industry types to get the joke. (God help them if they really were to see how shows evolve.) One of the sly bits in the series is Myra (Daisy Haggard), the head of comedy development, who has the same sour smile and confused look at all times - a visual joke that never fails.

Mangan and Greig are exceptionally good as the fish-out-of-water Brits, horrified that their show is getting rejiggered. Mangan's Sean is seduced by Hollywood, and Greig's Beverly is repulsed and appalled at the cluelessness. When the network hires LeBlanc to play the lead, Episodes takes off to all kinds of unexpected places - with LeBlanc getting a glorious showcase - and the show avoids any potential trouble spots.

In fairness, not every network would take a British series called Lyman's Boys, about a headmaster at an elite boys boarding school, and change it to Pucks! about a hockey coach at said school. But then again, one or two would. And that's all the truth Episodes needs to tap into.