Funny Woman 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Barbara exchanges sexist Blackpool for London at the beginning of the ‘swinging sixties’, where she is soon discovered by an impresario who arranges for her a role in a sitcom. The team she works with sees her talent, but the broadcaster has his doubts about this unknown name with a stupid-sounding accent. The first episode is decisive: the audience falls for her. Now that she is becoming famous, she faces a number of problems, but what bothers Barbara most is how men steamroll over women.
Funny Woman is the film adaptation of Nick Hornsby’s book Funny Girl, a light comedy-drama novel. In the title, a girl has been made into a woman, because the title role is for Gemma Arterton who is approaching her forties. Of course, there is no rule that the word ‘girl’ can no longer be used after a certain age, but this prevents lame jokes from being made on social media.
However, the word ‘funny’ is a lot more ironic here. Gemma Arterton is a good actress, but she’s not funny. She doesn’t have a smile anywhere, especially not on her ass. The moments when she makes a joke in a calm manner does not provoke any laughter and when she frantically tries to be funny it causes vicarious shame.
It’s only when she’s in the studio and the cameras are rolling that everything falls into place. In the black and white images of an old British sitcom, her character sparkles. The humor is in the style of Carry On films: always silly and never not funny. And as soon as that stops, it’s gone again, like Cinderella losing her comic slipper after twelve hours. What Arterton does have is ‘screen presence’, but in a series with this title that is not enough.
That also conflicts a bit with the purpose of the book and this film adaptation: the character is more than tired of being seen as a pretty (and therefore empty) face. Nevertheless, a lot of time and effort is put into Arterton’s appearance ““ even the opening credits show pictures of only her. Funny Woman seems to be a bit of vanity for her.
The atmosphere is incredibly cute. Archive material of London is occasionally shown Barbara uses the computer, so that you always see her blonde locks somewhere in the picture. The art department shows a good eye for detail with the sets, which never undermines the credibility that this story took place sixty years ago. The cinematography is contemporary, but that does not bother; there are no zooms or quick pans needed to give the nostalgia a boost.
Emancipation runs quite loosely as a theme throughout the series and only really comes to the fore in the last episode in an unsubtle monologue. But actually all the drama is handled very loosely without too much fuss. Barbara has a black friend who briefly struggled with racism, one of the writers of her sitcom struggles with his sexuality and Barbara still feels the consequences of her mother’s left the family when she was young. All more fill than lighting.
In some ways that is wrong, because in some respect Funny Woman wants to be more than a crazy comedy film about the sixties. The series has clearly been expensive and is trying to convey a message. But this is what you get when you use chick lit as source material. Emancipation also goes overboard when it comes to romance.
On the other hand, the light-hearted tone of Funny Woman makes it a binge series. The origins and development of the sitcom arouse curiosity to see how this story continues and the high level of jokes, even if they are not laugh-out-loud jokes, creates a pleasant atmosphere. With these six episodes, the book was filmed in its entirety, so despite an ending with a small opening, this will probably be the case.
