MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
March 14, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

BLACKADDER | 1983–89

As an American, Blackadder is perhaps the best – or best after Fawlty Towers which has a diamond-hard perfection – example of UK television’s brilliant habit of limiting a given series to a comparatively short run, usually 6 episodes. Where even the best American network shows run on into bloat, inconsistency, and fatigue, a UK series of 6 half-hours can be fully conceived and written and fool-proofed. They can express an authorial voice in a way American shows rarely do and are far less subject to on-the-fly short cuts and Hail Mary problem-solving. More, the best of British comedy, precisely because of the smaller stakes and less financial risk, can plow a narrower furrow of subject matter, indulge a weirder sense of humor, and generally push the margins of what might expect to have popular appeal.

The first series of Blackadder is not great (the only must-watch episode is with Miriam Margoyles as the Spanish Infanta and Jim Broadbent as her ever-present translator). It’s with series two that the show gloriously finds its feet, when the setting jumps from the made-up 15th reign of Richard IV to that of Elizabeth I. This is firstly because Ben Elton joins Richard Curtis as co-writer, and secondly because they conceive the defining feature of Blackadder going forward, where each of the main actors plays a descendent of the previous versions whose social position has mostly diminished in the meantime. The title character, Edmund Blackadder, goes from royal prince to Elizabethan Lord to Regency butler to a WWI infantry captain, with every iteration accompanied by a steadily more dim manservant named Baldrick. The pleasure of watching Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson subtly tweak their relationship each time is further augmented by the recurring turns of the rest of the regular cast – Tim McInerny, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Miranda Richardson – doing the same, sometimes as fresh supporting characters, sometimes in florid one-off appearances.

The humor is equal parts sparkling wit and broad vulgarity – deliberately and insistently playing one off of the other. Blackadder revels in how historical insight, smart writing, and brilliant performance can serve the lowest of comedic ends to stunning effect. In a similar dynamic, each series balances ridiculous antics against a fresh set of life and death stakes – dynastic peril, Elizabeth I’s propensity for executions, the Regency’s revolutionary fever, the meat grinder of the Somme – in a cheerful back-and-forth of close shaves and near victories … until at the end, when each time (just about) everyone dies.

It’s all but impossible to pick a favorite series (the Blackadder’s Christmas Carol special is also superb). Each is great in different ways, their variation a source of pleasure in itself, and preference more a matter of details of taste. Do you prefer Blackadder arrogant or abject? Baldrick cunning or a dolt? Laurie’s idiot Prince Regent or Richardson’s homicidal Queen? Less expected, given that it’s a show about an amoral and ambitious schemer, Blackadder’s final episode ends on a surprisingly moving note – in fact one of the only non-mawkish and genuinely tear-inducing moments I can think of from such a sardonic and scathing comedy.

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MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

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