DVD Watch

Pulling: The Complete First Season

Gavin & Stacey: Season One

The first season of Pulling begins with a wedding, and Gavin & Stacey's ends with one. That's not the only likeness between these two popular sitcoms that debuted on BBC3 within a year of each other – they're both the products of talented writer/performers, and both headline casual sex and Olympian benders, dysfunctional families, and best mates who do very bad things – but constitutionally, they're worlds apart. Actually, Pulling kicks off with the promise of a wedding, undone when Donna (Sharon Horgan, who co-created the show with Dennis Kelly) decides to dump the dependable but boring fiancé and re-enter the dating fray. The title is British slang for "picking up," although that suggests something far more proactive than what Donna and her girlfriends do, which is get drunk and have blackout sex with assorted unsavories. Pulling can be viciously funny, but its characters – especially Donna's best friend, Karen, an alcoholic preschool teacher played by Tanya Franks with a perma-snarl – go through the same self-defeating paces again and again, making for an arcless, airless show built on a dispiriting sameness. Not so with Gavin & Stacey, which takes a potentially canned premise about strangers who fall in love over the phone (she's in Wales, while he's an Essex boy) and turns it into an opportunity for real character depth and development. When Gavin and Stacey (Mathew Horne and Joanna Page) finally meet in person, they rocket through a giddy courtship to the dismay of their best friends (played by creators James Corden and Ruth Jones). The irony there is that although Corden and Jones play deeply unsentimental characters – he's feckless and crass; she's wonderfully loose and louche – together they've crafted a rather sunny sitcom: barmy, romantic, and expansive.