My Family starts tonight on BBC1. Photograph: BBC/DLT Entertainment/Neil Genower
The publicity push for the new series of My Family, which starts tonight, could barely have started worse. The show's leading actress Zoë Wanamaker has openly criticised the show revealing that she and Robert Lindsay refused to film an episode because the script was so bad. Wanamaker gave everybody a good laugh with her comments, possibly for the first time. For My Family has long been the sleepwalking embodiment of British comic under-achievement, unwilling or unable to pull itself out of its rut.
It's strange that a nation that rightly prides itself on its comic writers and performers rarely matches America when it comes to family sitcoms. There is certainly no contemporary equivalent of Showtime's extraordinary Weeds or anything close to the genius of Malcolm in the Middle. British efforts never capture the rivalries, pettiness and nastiness of family life like the great American family sitcoms do. It's as if they are scared to subvert the nuclear family. My Family deliberately adopted the American production model of team-writing, with the scripts banged into shape by furious rewrites from the ensemble writing crew. Yet still too many episodes fell flat and the gags written to pump up ailing scenes felt forced in with little concern for situation or character. They replicated the technical aspects of the American shows without capturing their spirit. They could not escape the fundamental play-it-safe conservatism of the plotting nor avoid plumping for the fail-safe comedy archetypes of useless husband and nagging wife.
The great family sitcom has got to say something about the family unit that is more profound than "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em". Parachute in as many witty gags as you like - if it's just a soulless retread of old conventions we're not going to be inspired. And if your star actress knifing you in the guts on the eve of your seventh season doesn't tell you something's wrong, I doubt anything will.
