‘Hapless’ Review: British-Jewish Cringe Comedy on Peacock Plays Like U.K.’s Answer to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’

Angie Han
·4 min read
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At the end of each chapter of Hapless, Paul (Tim Downie) cracks open his laptop to scan the headlines of The Jewish Enquirer. Almost invariably, whatever piddling story he’s spent the past episode chasing has been outflanked by the likes of “Cloudy weather in Tel Aviv” (mind you, the show takes place in London) and buried among links to “exclusives” like “Twin brothers share bar mitzvah” and “Jewish Film Festival opens with Jewish-themed film.”

Even by the standards of “the fourth-largest Jewish publication in the U.K.,” these are nothing articles. But they’re right in line with the spirit of the series, an amusingly sour half-hour comedy about a petty man getting worked up over petty things, with petty results. Think of it as a British Curb Your Enthusiasm, if Larry David had been a total nobody forced to look for the “jangle” (Jewish angle) in every remotely newsy bit of fluff for a couple hundred quid a pop.

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From the start, it’s clear that Paul is not a good guy. He’s not a bad guy, exactly, it’s just — well, he’s the kind of man who’ll gallantly offer a woman a coin so she can borrow a cart at the market, and then spend the rest of the installment reminding her that she owes him £1 when she turns down a date with him in favor of his even more awkward best friend (Josh Howie’s Simon). Or the sort who’ll spend hours tallying up every single symbol in a matching card game so that he can beat his eight-year-old nephew (Daniel Sinyor’s Joshie) the next time they play. He’s never met a molehill he couldn’t turn into a mountain or a nit he couldn’t pick; even a peanut butter marketed as “life-changing” becomes grounds for cornering a local MP to demand stricter label restrictions.

He can be “racist, sexist, fattist, possibly transphobic and misanthropic,” as he confesses to his father (Geoff McGivern in season one, Michael Fenton Stevens in season two) in a rare moment of glum self-reflection. But as with Curb, the joke is that even if Paul is not a very nice person, he’s often coming from a shamefully relatable place. Some of the funniest jokes in Hapless play like anxiety spirals made manifest, or perhaps like creator Gary Sinyor’s way of replaying arguments he’s lost. At one point, Paul upsets an acquaintance not by gawking at his breastfeeding wife, but by averting his eyes. “Looking away means you’re thinking about her breasts in a sexual way,” argues the angry husband. “Otherwise, you’d just ignore it.” Even when he’s trying not to offend, it seems, he can’t help but do so.

If Paul’s misguided instincts might be recognizable to just about anyone, Hapless distinguishes itself from other observational comedies with the specificity of its Jewishness. Storylines revolve around Paul trying to find a mohel who doesn’t have reputation for shaky hands, or around the differences between Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews like Paul. (As his sister Naomi, played by Lucy Montgomery in the first season and Jeany Spark in the second, puts it, the former get “lemons and tomatoes and sunshine” while the latter get “centuries of beetroot and turnip and ice.”) In one of the series’ darker jokes, the founders of a Jewish-Islamic relations organization debate the wording of a press release condemning a violent attack, settling on the phrase “quite heinous” because “then when there’s another, we can call it ‘heinous,’ and still leave us the option of ‘really heinous’ for the one after.”

Occasionally, Hapless stumbles into thornier topics: A subplot about Paul taking the piss out of a pro-Palestinian canvasser inevitably feels more fraught in 2024 than it might have in 2020 and spring 2023, when the first two seasons now being released in the U.S. on Peacock originally aired in the U.K. But the series’ general worldview might be best summarized by a Jewish Enquirer article from the premiere. While the headline touts an “Israel/Palestinian mothers’ ‘ground-breaking’ coffee morning,” the copy clarifies that “after a few cups of coffee, the mothers decided to talk about trivial matters only.” Hapless doesn’t have any big answers, and it doesn’t try to run all that deep. It finds plenty of wry humor to mine from the exasperating little surface details of every day life.

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