And now for our all-too-frequent feature, "European TV shows no one has heard about that are much better than US broadcast TV." I'll work on a better title. Unfortunately cancelled after its second season, Pulling is the kind of show that wins awards and acclaim and stills ends up unfortunately cancelled. The humor is dark, the women's roles are complex and interesting, and the guys are mostly fundamentally flawed--much like real life, go figure.
Pulling follows three single women, one of whom starts the first episode engaged. Series co-creator Sharon Horgan plays Donna, who works an uneventful office job, Tanya Franks as Karen, a promiscuous primary school teacher, and Rebekah Staton as Louise, a naive cafe hostess. The co-creator and writer who does not also appear in the show is Dennis Kelly, who writes plays I'd be interested to read if they were published in the States.
Pulling was the last comedy show produced and brought to fruition by Harry Thompson, who was a primary driving force behind the conceptual creation of Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G. Thompson also produced popular panel shows in the UK that exposed the public to Cohen, Ricky Gervais, and others not as familiar to dirty American audiences who I could pretend to know more about than I do. Here's Thompson's Wikipedia page.
I think it's a discredit to Pulling to recommend it as Dark Sex and the City, as if it were some sort of alternate-universe version of affluent women getting into all kinds of hilarious jams and sometimes Very Special episodes. It's indicative of the relative state of women in the media that everything involving women has to be relative to that fucking show (which, full disclosure, I watched and enjoyed on and off). "It's like Sex and the City crossed with the evening news!" Pulling distinguishes itself from most TV these days by not reinforcing accepted sitcom stereotypes, irrespective of gender.
Even many of the best American shows that are untimely cancelled still bend over for the same tired crap, featuring relationships like an idealized damsel in distress paired with a hopeless manchild. Nothing fully traumatic or lasting ever happens to people in these shows. They both stay the same and never show an inch of development. There is no jeopardy too trivial.
Not that they're similar in any way other than narrative structure, but Pulling continues snowballing and raising the stakes for the three women at its center episode by episode as Eastbound and Down recently did with a completely different components. Flawed people making mistakes is a very interesting thing to watch, completely unlike Confessions of a Shopaholic.
The primary thread I could relate to is the thrust of the first episode, in that heterosexual women worldwide are less likely to marry because, well...look at the options they have. The only thing that frustrates me is that now I have to wait for the second season to be released so I can plow through the rest of the show. The first season of Pulling is now available on DVD.