Series Review: 'Friends from College' isn't smart, but it sure is funny

Judged by its laughs-per-minute strike rate, Netflix's raucous new comedy drama Friends from College is an undeniable success.

Yet the lengths to which the eight-part series from Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sara Marshall) goes to milk chuckles are so absurd as to call into the question the entire point of the endeavour.

In this tale of an ageing Generation X friendship and early-onset midlife blues, the plot, character development and basic narrative coherence are sacrificed on the bonfire of instant-gratification guffaws.

Keegan-Michael Key stars as Ethan, a frustrated and impoverished literary novelist conducting a 20-year affair with flinty executive Sam (Annie Parisse). Yet nothing about the characters convinces. One moment Ethan is a sympathetic tortured artist, desperate to outgrow his past as a wunderkind who never quite did anything wunder-ful. The next he's a prat-falling plank risking everything for a tongue-sarmie with Sam.

Just as uneven is Cobie Smulders as his wife, Lisa. The couple have moved to New York so that she can take up a job as legal counsel at a trading house. Here they reconnect with pals from their undergraduate days at Harvard, including the aforementioned Sam and Ethan's smarmy agent Max (The Wonder Years's Fred Savage - now a middle-age Methuselah).

But, despite her billing as the sensible one in the relationship, Lisa flits back and forth from prim naif to manic slapstick merchant. A scene in which she passes herself off as a Russian pop star, for instance, is funny yet damagingly incongruous to the character.

WATCH the trailer for Friends from College

All of the series's strengths and weaknesses are on display in a sequence in which, in order to brainstorm a new young adult novel Ethan has been cajoled into attempting, he and Max embark on a wee-hours drugs binge.

The ensuing coke-snorting and competitive pizza chucking is a gonzo rush clearly cut together from hours of improvisation. And it has an undeniably deranged hilarity. It isn't smart but it is funny.

Television demands consistency and, for all its good intentions, Friends from College never rises above undergraduate puerility. - The Daily Telegraph

• 'Friends from College' is on Netflix

• This article was originally published in The Times.