Spaced
8 and 8:30 tonight
BBC America
Tim (Simon Pegg, the blond guy from Shaun of the Dead and a co-writer here) gets thrown out of his North London flat by his girlfriend. Daisy (Jessica Stevenson, the other co-writer), a girl Tim befriends at a neighborhood cafe, needs a roommate. After she spends several breakfasts looking in the classifieds for the perfect living arrangement—and he goofs off in the same booth—it dawns on these near strangers that they can live together affordably in a neat little two bedroom pad for let if they simply pose as a couple. As becomes apparent in this episode and the one that follows, they should be a couple—they are perfect for one another—but figuring that out is taking them even longer than their initial realization to become flatmates. You'd think it would hit them when they make sex noises to assure their boozy lady landlord upstairs that they are indeed together. But, alas . . . Further complicating matters is Daisy's wimpy boyfriend. And Tim's torch for his ex-. And his unwillingness to grow up (he's a comic-book geek skateboarder riding headlong into his thirties). And Daisy's ADD or whatever it is that prevents her from writing. Beginning tonight, BBC America re-runs the first two series (seasons) of Spaced, which debuted on Channel 4 in '99 (and was later re-run on Trio). With the success of Shaun of the Dead, the movies apparently beckon Pegg and his Spaced chums actor Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright. At least fans can re-live the magic for now while pining for all-new episodes, a notion the series 2 finale left wide open, before those damn zombies changed everything. Repeats June 26 with episodes picking up Fridays and repeating Mondays thereafter.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.