by I finally got around to watching the first season of Spaced, the British TeeVee series featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and directed by Edgar Wright. I have to say, it is really funny. Perhaps a little too targeted to my life experience in terms of age and pop culture; it makes me wonder how well it will hold up over the years.
Director Edgar Wright is pretty heavily influenced by Sam Raimi and everyone Raimi was influence by. He’s very inventive and you can see the style he employed on Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim and the latest Wright/Pegg/Frost project I still need to see: The End of the World.
Spaced would probably never fly on American broadcast teevee — the guns, and the drugs would be stripped out and a lot of the characters eccentricities would be sanded down. Someone equally inspired (and young — Pegg and Wright were young when they made this) could, however, make a brilliant series in this mold for HBO. Or a web-series I suppose.
