The chief characteristic so far has been nervousness: Chivalry reviewed

Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the show’s chief characteristic so far has been nervousness. Somewhere inside it, you feel, lurks an impulse to really let rip. But if so, Thursday’s first two episodes successfully resisted it. Now and again, we did get some jokes that might just frighten the admittedly neurotic horses of the new Moral Majority. The overall effect, though, was of a game of How Far Can You Go? in which the contestants’ answer was a firm ‘not very’.

Still, even this level of unorthodoxy seemed unlikely when the programme began. Coogan plays Cameron O’Neill, a Hollywood producer first seen beside a swimming pool asking a pair of bikini-clad lovelies if they might be interested in a trip to the Caribbean. Sadly, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Bobby Sohrabi (Solemani), a British director – and wearer of T-shirts saying ‘Women Unite’ – brought in by the studio to reshoot parts of his latest film along more acceptable lines.

The set-up became broader still when the pair had a meeting with the original director, who just had time to rather hammily confirm his sexist-dinosaur credentials before he conveniently died, leaving the two principals to slug it out between themselves.