US remake of Cuckoo back on the cards

An American remake of BBC Three comedy Cuckoo is back on the cards.

Radio Times review

The Lichfield love triangle is finally resolved in this delightfully silly special: Rachel is struggling to choose between nice-but-dull boyfriend Ben and the hunky-but-bonkers American who just happens to be the son of her late husband. As always, the real reason to tune in is Greg Davies who plays curmudgeonly dad Ken and inevitably ends up in a Santa Claus suit cussing wide-eyed children.

Meanwhile, Mum - a trilling Helen Baxendale - jumps to the wrong conclusion after suffering a fainting fit. Hang in there for the musical interlude crooned by Outnumbered veteran Tyger Drew-Honey.

There's Christmassy tension in Lichfield as Rachel's secret clinch with Dale Jr has become a bit of an elephant in the room. The lavish gifts of topiary won't likely help keep the secret from Ben either, who is plotting to ask for her hand in marriage. Meanwhile, Lorna, being a massive fan of Christmas, is shocked but also slightly thrilled to find that she may have been the subject of an immaculate conception.

Cuckoo - Series 2 review

Neither rejecting what it had built in the first series nor building upon it, it kind of just sat there and never figured out what it could change without Andy Samberg.

Cuckoo - Ken at Work episode review

Cuckoo has finally gotten its groove back. I just hope that next week's finale is just a strong, so that we can go out on a high.

Cuckoo - Funeral episode review

The jokes that were decipherable you could see coming a mile off, like Dale's mistaken identity as Rafferty's lover, but others were either overly tired or totally confusing.

Cuckoo: why swapping one star for another doesn't work

The BBC3 sitcom replaced Andy Samberg with Taylor Lautner, but as Two and a Half Men and Midsomer Murders have proven, TV shows rarely survive a serious personnel change.

Review: Cuckoo episode 2.2

I know many people will disagree, but as a fan of well-orchestrated gross-out comedy, this episode also had me laughing during its outrageous climax.

Radio Times review

Beleaguered Ken goes away for the weekend, leaving the family to run riot and the show to soldier on without Greg Davies. It plays safe with a standard frat-house/Inbetweeners story: bluntly randy Dylan (Tyger Drew-Honey) is told by his cold, beautiful classmate Zoe (Holly Earl) that she'll take his virginity if he throws a house party while Dad's absent. The influx of hungry ravers gives mystic Dale his chance to show he can run his late father's baked potato van.

Cuckoo's telegraphed plots and wild implausibles make it an uneven watch, but the good bits are great. As the cartoonish Dale, Twilight heart-throb Taylor Lautner shows he's got fine comic timing as well as beauty, the swine.

Almost two years after it began, BBC Three's Cuckoo is back for a second series. Trouble is, the two actors who formed the central romance of the show are gone; U.S comedian Andy Samberg as spaced-out hippy Dale "Cuckoo" Ashbrick, and Tamla Kari as the young British backpacker who fell for his bohemian charms and dragged him back to live with her middle-class parents in middle England.

It wouldn't have surprised me if creators Robin French and Kieron Quirke had decided to let the show die without Samberg and Kari coming back as the unconventional newly-weds, especially as series 1 ended in a satisfying way with few loose ends. Not many people have been crying out for more Cuckoo, let's face it, and Samberg fans can get their fix now he's the lead in U.S hit Brooklyn Nine-Nine over on E4. However, someone at the BBC obviously thought differently, so Cuckoo returns... and, ironically given the titular bird's thieving behaviour, has two new faces in the nest.

Esther Smith (The Midnight Beast) directly replaces Kari as Rachel Thompson, bringing a slightly geekier feel to the character; but rather than recast Cuckoo they've made the peculiar choice to kill him off (a tragic mountaineering accident, with Samberg providing vocals on a sherpa's radio), and bring in his long-lost son Dale. (I guess Cuckoo wasn't very imaginative when naming babies, and--if my maths is correct--must have fathered Dale when he was 14-years-old. Ewww.)

If you can overlook these weird changes, I'm still not sure it was worth bringing Cuckoo back for seconds. Lautner's best-known for showing his pectorals in Twilight movies, so doesn't have the comedy grounding that held Samberg in good stead. Or the same rapport with Greg Davies, as his step-mother's father. Oh yeah, that's another problem: by making Dale a blood relation of Cuckoo, it's all very yucky that Rachel and her mother Lorna (Helen Baxendale) both fancy him. If the show is still intending to be a comedy romance, at heart, this could get very uncomfortable indeed... but perhaps Lautner's character will just become more of an oddball lodger? To be fair to him, Lautner wasn't objectionable in this first episode--he just didn't leap off the screen, playing a slightly quieter character. I just wonder if drawing the Twi-hards is beneficial to Cuckoo, because at least the first series attracted discerning comedy fans aware of Samberg's work on Saturday Night Live, and with comedy group Lonely Island.

We'll have to see if Cuckoo II develops its own identity and memories of Samberg's presence melt away, but I have doubts the chemistry can be replicated. Not that the first series was a diamond, but it could have been polished with a proper return, whereas now it's back to square-one. It doesn't help that laughs were few and far between, either, but maybe future episodes will do better now this awkward transition is over...