The release of Chris O’Dowd’s new Irish dramedy Small Town, Big Story has been overshadowed by a recent interview in which the actor and writer voiced his support for Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan. “I wish he was writing more, and I wish he was in the industry more,” O’Dowd told the Times of London. “I think he’s the best comedy writer I’ve worked with.”
The comments have ricocheted around the internet, but is it such a surprise that he would rate Linehan so highly as a comic writer? O’Dowd owes his early success to his fellow Irishman, who plucked him from the obscurity of RTÉ‘s The Clinic and cast him in The IT Crowd – the sitcom which catalysed O’Dowd’s public persona of lovable oaf.
Whatever about Linehan’s controversial position on transgender issues, The IT Crowd and Father Ted have weathered the passage of time and are still beloved today. Alas, it is hard to imagine a similar future for the underwhelming Small Town, Big Story (Sky Max, from Thursday), in which Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks plays a woman born in Ireland but raised mainly in the United States and now back in her hometown as a big shot producer.
Hendricks is great as the returning émigré (she sticks to her own accent but musters a decent “fáilte”), while Paddy Considine is her old flame, Séamus, in the fictional border village of Drumbán. They still have feelings for one another – but in the case of Hendricks’s Wendy, those emotions are mixed with resentment. She has never been able to forgive Séamus for how he treated her after the young lovers encountered mysterious forces in the woods on the eve of the millennium.
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The events of that night have poisoned her relationship with her father, the local reverend (Ian McElhinney) and complicated her return to Drumbán, where she is overseeing a TV show based on Celtic mythology. Séamus’s life is no basket of cherries either: his wheelchair using wife, Catherine (Eileen Walsh), has long since fallen out of love with him and is having an affair with a fellow teacher at the local school.
O’Dowd was inspired to write Small Town, Big Story after bringing the Sky Comedy Moone Boy to his home of Boyle a decade ago and noting how a large TV production affects a community (lots of rubbernecking by the locals, for one thing). But Small Town, Big Story never settles into a groove and suffers from trying to play to several audiences at once.
Christina Hendricks on Small Town, Big Story: ‘It was just my weird cup of tea’ – The Irish Times
One problem is that viewers abroad will have a very different idea of what small-town Ireland should look like than those at home – and O’Dowd comes unstuck attempting to appeal to both. While the two lead parts inevitably go to “international” actors, he has assembled an impressive home-grown cast – including Deirdre O’Kane, Simon Delaney, Susan Lynch and Amy Huberman (Don Wycherley was presumably out of the house when O’Dowd’s call came through). But a haze of Oirishness often descends, too, with characters talking in a sort of theatrical stage Paddy-isms that no doubt went down well with Sky executives in London, who are, after all, bankrolling the whole thing.
Tonally, the series is all over the place. Overseas audiences won’t catch the nuances but the story is set in deepest Fermanagh, filmed in south county Dublin and intended as a love letter to Boyle while starring Hendricks as an Irish woman with an American accent. It never gels, and that’s before you get to the paranormal stuff that is crowbarred in. O’Dowd is all over the headlines at the moment courtesy of his Linehan comments. Sadly, that’s probably as much hype as the disappointing Small Town, Big Story can expect.
