Hardware

2000s British tv sitcom

Hardware store somewhere in London and inside 4 unusual men - student Steve, weird Kenny, veteran Rex and Mike, who is bored with his life.

Life in hardware store can be full of excitement and adventures. No, not really - it’s mostly boring and uninspiring job. Perhaps that’s why Mike and Kenny spend most of the time being rude to student Steve, their boss Rex, the customers, inventing some weird things to do just to get through the day. To be fair Rex is not a typical employer, the customers could be really irritating and Steve is a student, so... he more or less deserves to suffer a bit. Mike’s girlfriend, Ann, runs a cafe nearby, so they see each other at least during lunch breaks.

Series created by Simon Nye (Men Behaving Badly, Is It Legal?) was quite original idea, but it seems that the project was really under-developed. The characters were good, plots of the episodes were ok, but the whole series was really lacking any depth. Everything was rather superficial, the characters lacked any background, the conflicts between them were uninteresting at best, which made the episodes lacking any distinctive points - it was just one long anecdote about running a hardware shop.

First series was promising, there were some great ideas (f.e. Naked episode), but after that Hardware was just waiting for the cancellation to happen. Really unimpressive second series just finished the life of Hardware and to be fair it wasn’t too soon. Some of the episodes were promising, but the promises were never really fulfilled, the characters and chemistry were not bad, but then again never really had much chance to shine.

Hardware was interesting approach to sitcom based in workplace, but lack of depth and only mild jokes never gave the opportunity for the series to raise above mediocrity. It was fun to watch, but unfortunately it wasn’t funny.

Rating	4.8
Funny	3 / 10
Entertaining	4 / 5
Characters	3 / 5
Nonrepetitive	2 / 5