It is strange to come to a show caught already in a pincer movement of expectations. Not only is Sky Atlantic’s Camping, written by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner and starring Jennifer Garner, an American take of Julia Davis’s original creation of the same name, but it has already been aired – and pretty much panned – in the US before making its way back over here.
First things first: it is not a straight copy. There are many changes in content and storyline (although such unforgettable scenes as the blowjob two otherwise heterosexual men are manipulated into performing are retained). Kathryn, for example, is an Instagrammer “cresting 11,000 followers”, manically trying to maintain an image as well as neurotically control the lives of everyone around her, rather than the wholly unglamorous martyr Fay was in the first series. And her brother-in-law Joe (Chris Sullivan) is a recovering addict of a very different stripe from his predecessor Adam.
But it is the absence of Davis’s trademark malevolence that is the greatest change. This is Camping with no creeping feeling of dread. There is no real darkness, no feeling that the creators are sinking a mineshaft into the deepest parts of humanity’s rotten psyche and casting up a fetid chunk to the light as there was in the original tale of eight fortysomething friends on a birthday camping trip organised by an overextended control freak and disturbed by the advent of a new presence with entirely different sensibilities.
It is impossible to know whether Dunham and Konner were aiming to reproduce the British version’s horror, but the casting of Garner (as tightly-wound Kathryn), an actor considered to be the American sweetheart of her generation, suggests that – as with the US version of The Office – they could not bring themselves to go all in.
Likewise, Juliette Lewis in the Davis part – here called Jandice – is an essentially kindly spirit whose mere bohemianism (rather than the sociopathy that drove Davis) is enough to upset the group. It may be that Americans are constitutionally incapable of the bleakness of outlook required to reproduce many British programmes (and attitudes, fashions, staple meals and many other things) or it may be that they choose not to – and who can blame them? We are an odd place and getting odder by the minute, and they themselves need all the sunny optimism they can cling on to while Mueller delves and drills.
So, going Camping with Dunham rather than Davis is different. Did it deserve to be panned? There is a lot right with it. The performances are good and most of the jokes land, although their quality does fluctuate between the acute specificity that Dunham excelled at in Girls (such as having “William Hurt” as the answer in a guessing game for kids) and laboured clunkers that should not have been written by anybody (don’t waste the chance to invent a porn-site name with “Corrupted Pussy”). The eddies and swirls of tension and attraction that develop among the group during the longest four-day trip of their lives are nicely evoked.
But there is also a lot wrong with it. The characters are all written without nuance – Kathryn especially. Without the infusion of Garner’s innate ability, she would be burned at the stake by the rest of the group before the end of the first episode and no one would think it unreasonable. Nina-Joy (Janicza Bravo) might be grateful for even so much attention, though – while they are all uninflected characters, they do at least have characters. She, the only person of colour in the production, is vastly underwritten, which is a particular oversight given the criticism Dunham has come in for in the past for her perceived neglect of anyone and anything outside her own worldview and experience.
The fact that the eight protagonists are pretty much relentlessly petty, stupid and childish makes it hard to invest in any of them and means that the suggestions of redemption and healing for Kathryn and Walt at the end feel unearned and unconvincing.
Given that it is a reworking already, it feels strangely like a first draft of a show. The seeds of both tragedy and black comedy are all there, the cast is a talented one, Dunham and Konner themselves are geniuses – but they needed either to push it further if it was Davis’s grotesquery that drew them to her, or pull back and pitch their tent in more fully comedic climes if not. I picture Davis, sitting back with her stilettoed feet on a shaking, broken actor and laughing, horribly. “Go bleak,” she cackles, “or go home.”
