There’s something about bees. Arrested Development knew it, Jerry Seinfeld knew it when he signed on for Bee Movie, Wild Mountain Thyme seemed to sort of know it but maybe didn’t quite know it enough. Stick a bee in something, and that thing is automatically at least half way to being funny. So I had at least some hopes for Rowan Atkinson’s new series on Netflix: Man vs Bee. Great, I thought, another addition to the noble canon of comedy about bees. A premise so overtly stupid – a man, vs a bee – that it could only be a work of absurdist, slapstick genius, from a great auteur of the genre.
I hoped in vain. The 100-odd minutes of Man vs Bee, split over nine episodes for some reason, were some of the most perplexing I have ever spent watching television. Atkinson pays Trevor Bingley, which the promo materials for the show describe as his new comedy character, a well-meaning but useless divorced dad. We meet him in court, where he is up for arson, destruction of priceless artwork and criminal damage, among other crimes. He receives his sentence, and apologises to the judge, adding “you see, there was this bee”.
Content from our partners
