Douglas is Cancelled

Ultimately, Douglas Is Cancelled is a cold slap to the face that both challenges and supports "cancel culture" in bringing nuance to the conversation, allowing the audience to really deeply think about where their own line is and whether it should be changed.

It’s not perfect and sometimes very “on the nose”, but mostly it is clever and sharp, managing to nimbly shift from being farcical to serious and back again. Plus the denouement is unexpected, which is always a bonus.

It is overall fast, funny and absolutely furious. Some viewers will love it unreservedly, some will love it all apart from the bits where it takes aim at beliefs they hold dear, some will hate it unreservedly for reasons they can articulate clearly, and some will hate it for daring to exist.

The workplace-comedy trappings and quips that can make this watch enjoyable—thanks in no small part to the comical turns by Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed and House Of The Dragon’s Simon Russell Beale, who play a very unfunny comedy writer and a daffy agent, respectively—often feel at odds with the serious things Moffat is trying to say and portray.

While Douglas Is Cancelled has a lot of story flaws, the dialogue is funny for the most part and is expertly delivered by Wilkinson, Gillan, Kingston and the rest of the cast, which might be enough to endure this non-controversy for four 40-minute episodes.

The four-part series is at its best when exploring the more nuanced elements of a trial by public opinion and the contemporary media environment. Karen Gillan and Hugh Bonneville are excellent throughout, elevating the material – their performances make Douglas Is Cancelled a mostly worthwhile watch

Douglas Is Cancelled ends up making a nuanced point (some do wrong; others facilitate it); it’s just a bit of a flat-footed slog to get there.

It's trying to dig into cancel culture, sexism, social media and #MeToo, but does it manage to succinctly pose and answer any of the questions it raises in its four episodes? In some ways, yes and in others, it's such a vast breadth of subjective material that there will be plenty of people (including this writer) who would want the series to go that step further.

Its compelling premise is somewhat obscured by needlessly complicated plotting. Still, for all its flaws, Douglas Is Cancelled has plenty going for it, not least Bonneville himself, totally disarming in his warm but utterly spineless bluster. More importantly for a comedy, I laughed out loud more than once.

The story chooses to use a metaphorical sledgehammer in place of anything that resembles nuance and rejects complexity in favor of easy-to-digest moral platitudes and an ending that feels like it’s wandered in from a different series.

This is a subject matter that deserves ambiguity, grey areas and hard questions, but Moffat offers only sermons, moral binaries and easy answers. In the end, it’s no different to an ate cake: filling but not nourishing.