<em>Camping </em>Is Awful, but Not Awful Enough
In 2015, my colleague Christopher Orr pondered why the British are better at satire. The crux of it, he concluded, was that British comedy is both lighter and darker, more cynical but less serious, rooted in awfulness and unfettered by the obligation to make characters likable in any way.
Which about sums up what’s wrong with , Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s new comedy miniseries for HBO. The British series it’s based on, which was written and), is relentlessly excruciating, filled with awful and pitiful human beings who savage one another over the course of the world’s worst birthday getaway.It is, in short, hilarious. The alpha of the group, Fiona (Vicki Pepperdine), is a woman so sour that her features have puckered into a mean, disgusted em dash. Given the modicum of power that planning the weekend affords her, she’s a passive-aggressive tyrant, deploying the word with a menace that only British people can master.
