Style-wise, the show is slightly less conventional than its odd couple set-up, at least for television. Peep Show takes a favourite old trick of horror movies, the point-of-view camera perspective, and deliciously mixes it with that classic film noir staple, the voice-over.
The result is a gleefully subjective view of Mark and Jez' lives. Anyone who's ever seen Lady In The Lake or Dark Passage, a pair of noir films from 1947, where most of the film consists of a voiceover from the lead character playing over scenes shot primarily from his POV, with characters talking directly to camera when they address him, will be on familiar ground.
But forget all that for a minute. Peep Show would be worth barely a footnote on curiously shot early 21st century TV comedies if this technical trickery was all there was to it. The real reason Peep Show works is simply that it's very, very funny, through the magic combination of being both well-written and well-performed by its cast, from the leads to secondary characters like fan-favourite Super Hans, a role, Sam says, where "We were lucky enough in Matt King to cast someone who made the character at least 20% better than he was on the page."
With satisfying long-term plot arcs (series producer Phil Clarke is a big fan of Buffy, a series famed for its acutely planned series arcs) building to delicious conclusions, razor-sharp scripts with more punchlines in five minutes than some sitcoms manage in half an hour, and a cast who prove that virtuoso acting performances are possible in comedy, Peep Show has it made. In any other series, Woody Allen-esque lines like "I suppose doing things you hate is just the price you pay to avoid loneliness" are almost throw-away, where in other series they would be the punchline we'd been waiting ten minutes for. And yet Peep Show was almost axed by Channel 4. Why?
