This TV series is superbly vicious: that’s a review in a nutshell.

Sometime in 2013, fresh from his latest turn as Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies,Sir Ian McKellen headed to the small screen. He’s moved in with Sir Derek Jacobi in the ITV sitcom ‘Vicious.’

The British acting icons play partners Freddie and Stuart, two men who have lived together in a small Covent Garden apartment for nearly 50 years. Freddie was a budding actor and Stuart worked in a bar when they first met, but their careers are pretty much over and their lives now consist of entertaining their frequent guests, making sure that their aged dog Balthazar is still breathing, and hurling caustic insults at each other. Frances De La Tour (Hugo, Alice In Wonderland) plays the pair’s best friend.

‘ Family Guy’ and ‘Will & Grace’ producer Gary Janetti scripted and co-created the comedy with playwright Mark Ravenhill.

At first Vicious looks like satire. Freddie (Ian McKellen) and Stuart (Derek Jacobi) are old queens living out their golden years in a multi-camera sitcom doing what such characters do: insulting each other like they’re being graded on it. Every line’s a setup or a punchline in an endless war of insults, and every delivery involves a dismount and a pose like it’s the Olympics.

It’s not that the bitchy British series is better than ’70s classics. It’s a different era, and Vicious is on steroids.

Freddie and Stuart while away their days in a Norma Desmond flat festooned with awards from Freddie’s theater days and giant black-out curtains. When boy-next-door Ash (Iwan Rheon, ‘Game Of Throne’s Ramsay Snow,) innocently opens those curtains to let some light into their lives, Freddie and Stuart hiss like vampires and retreat into their kitchen. Vicious has no room for light. Ash is our guide to this strange world, confused and frightened by the sitcommery of these lovers who seem to hate one another.

Really, they insult everyone, especially their friends: horny Violet (Frances De La Tour), in-and-out-of-it Penelope (Marcia Warren), and stingy Mason (Philip Voss). Then again, Ash is as much a part of this sitcom silliness as everyone else, even before he proves he can keep up with Freddie and Stuart. He’s new in town, but the reason he spends so much time with his bilious neighbours and their elderly friends is to provide the sitcom’s animating culture clash, in this case with his affable, hopeful youth.

Ash is the weird one on Vicious. The others brag about themselves, cut one another down to size, lament their lots, and complain about the conversation. When Freddie walks through a scene complimenting Violet and calling Stuart his love, it’s an expression of his depression. Episodes are so riddled with sniping and one-upmanship that to marathon is to coat oneself in armor as the arrows whiz by. All at once the pattern reveals itself, the manual assault taking on an automatic quality, although that’s partly because some of the missiles really are self-guided. Vicious thrives on the weekly return to this living room battlefield. “I never know when I’m going too far,” says Freddie to Violet after a particularly sharp retort sends Stuart off to lick his wounds in the kitchen, “but I’m always so glad when I do.”

Beneath all the insults, deep down, Freddie and Stuart really do care about each other. And all their friends. Freddie and Stuart believe sniping is the sincerest form of flattery.

Brandon Nowalk writes : Vicious isn’t quite a multi-cam satire or a pastiche winking at the silliness of sitcoms. No, its winks are all right there on-screen, when Freddie flirts with Ash or when Stuart mocks him for it. Rather, Vicious is an apotheosis of the form: Its theatricality is expert, its rote insult comedy is delicious but not unyielding, and its unhip datedness is mined for exactly that quality. The subjects fueling all the pettiness—gayness, performance, fame, obsolescence, love, sex—derive directly from Freddie and Stuart, the fabric of the men themselves, their relationship, and the series around them. The plots take comedy warhorses—like old people not being much for night clubs—and spins them into silk, compensating for cliché with defensive, eloquent, and wholly disproportionate fury. In the hands of McKellen, Jacobi, and company, they are sitcom characters who manage the tightrope between human warmth and on-screen viciousness, and they do it by being the best damn sitcom characters they can be.

Created by: Gary Janetti and Mark Ravenhill

Starring: Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Frances De La Tour, Iwan Rheon, Marcia Warren, Philip Voss

  Gay, LGBT, Media, Pride Month, Queer, Vicious Tv sitcom