‘The Full Monty’ Boys Are Back, With Less Stripping But Lots of Charm

In the 1997 sleeper hit comedy The Full Monty, six unemployed men in a dying English steel town attempt to make some cash by putting on a show where they will dance and strip for the local women. In the new FX sequel series, Gaz (Robert Carlyle), Dave (Mark Addy), and the rest of the group are in many ways more desperate. But they’re also too old and slow to reprise their greatest hit. When a stranger pressures them to do the dance again for the first time in 26 years, it’s comically awkward. “I just remember it being better than this,” their fan laments.

Even before that scene, the movie’s screenwriter Simon Beaufoy — who co-wrote every episode of this with Alice Nutter — recognizes that there is no way the series can re-create the specific magic of Gaz and the others strutting around on stage to Tom Jones’ “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” This new Full Monty doesn’t revolve around one big plan or performance, but simply opts to show what their lives are like a quarter-century later, like a light comic version of Michael Apted’s Up documentaries. The movie barely had a plot, the TV version even less so, but it’s charming and at times poignant to see all the ways that Gaz’s world has and hasn’t changed.

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The story, such as it is, picks up “seven Prime Ministers later” from the events of the film, accompanied by a news clip montage of various British politicians promising to revitalize old northern factory towns like Gaz and Dave’s native Sheffield. These declarations haven’t amounted to much that we can see. The theater where the lads took their kits off is long shuttered, and there’s still no local industry to provide reliable employment. Guy (Hugo Speer) has done well for himself as a shady real estate developer, but everyone else is struggling. Gaz picks up shifts as an orderly at the local hospital, but remains a disappointment to all, including his now-adult son Nathan (Wim Snape) and his teenage daughter Destiny (Talitha Wing). Dave does menial work as the custodian at the public school where his wife, Jean (Lesley Sharp), is headmistress, and it’s clear their marriage has seen better days. Lomper (Steve Huison) runs a cafe with his husband, Dennis (Paul Clayton), but it seems like the only clientele are the other Monty men, including the now-elderly Horse (Paul Barber) and Gerald (Tom Wilkinson).

Time already seemed to have passed these lads by back in 1997, and matters have only grown worse. The social safety net has been stretched so thin that it can barely catch anyone as they fall. In a later episode, Horse — whose disability checks have stopped coming because a civil service bureaucrat unfairly reclassifies him as capable of working — talks about how England somehow feels harsher than it did in the Thatcher years, which he never would have thought possible. Destiny and her peers roll their eyes at these out-of-touch geezers, but the kids are coming of age in a world where the options are even fewer and further between; at least Gaz and Dave had jobs at the factory for a while, you know?

Beaufoy and Nutter do a good job of reestablishing the city and its people. I haven’t watched the movie since it was in theaters, and hadn’t thought of it in nearly as long, but prior knowledge proves unnecessary. There are occasional references to events of the film, like when Guy and Lomper hooked up back then, but the show functions just fine as a pleasant, slightly whimsical tale of a working-class community where almost nobody works anymore. If anything, the most important pieces of backstory involve things that happened after the movie, like the reason why Dave and Jean aren’t getting on lately.

Wilkinson, whose voice has grown raspy in his mid-70s, doesn’t have a lot to do, as Gerald mostly sits in the cafe and complains about people being snowflakes and the like. And Guy awkwardly vanishes midway through the season, because Hugo Speer was fired following an investigation into “inappropriate conduct.” But the original group is surrounded by many prominent new characters like Destiny, Dennis, Jean’s friend and co-worker Hetty (Sophie Stanton), Miles Jupp as newly unemployed sad sack Darren, and Aiden Cook as “Twiglet,” a bullying victim whom Dave takes under his wing. The newcomers largely fit in well — it almost feels surprising when we see clips from the film and Dennis isn’t there dancing with Lomper and the others — with Talitha Wing a particular standout, and one of the best arguments for revisiting this world so many years later.

The episodic stories veer between abject silliness (Destiny accidentally steals a famous dog, Lomper gets mixed up in a scheme involving rare pigeon eggs) and high-minded issue-of-the-day stuff (Darren falls for an asylum seeker from Kurdistan, Jean has to make harsh cuts to the school’s budget). It tends to work best when it’s able to combine those tones, like an episode where Gaz tries to help out mentally ill graffiti artist Ant (Arnold Oceng), and winds up having to impersonate the guy to get around all the Catch-22 mechanisms that make it so hard for Ant to return to living on his own. But there’s a sweetness laced throughout that forgives the parts that don’t quite work.

Couple that with the fun of seeing Carlyle back at his most rascally, and with how well Addy and the others inhabit these roles after so much time away, and it’s a nice time that also clearly conveys a message about how we all need to do a better job of helping one another. Which sounds very much like the movie, even if the guys leave more than their hats on this time around.

All eight episodes of The Full Monty will begin streaming on June 14 on Hulu. I’ve seen the whole thing.

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