Life’s Too Short

How to jump into the wrong set of shoes and force it to adjust to your size, in Life’s Too Short.

The creators Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Warwick Davis’s Life’s Too Short is a lazy, though genuine, piece of art. A lot of the content that is used as a gimmick to make you laugh is adapted from their work on different platforms. And mind you, they’ve already been using a gimmick of a Hollywood celebrity per episode to attract the viewers to soak in this important subject matter. Which too is crafted as a gimmick, though not preachy, to shine a light on the not-so-conventional story elements. It’s exactly how Stephen Merchant describes the variety of art to Karl Pilkington in one of their audiobooks. As you can see, using these many sticks to fuel the engine of your series, they might have used McGuffin’s in the plot and we wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not the derivative that itches me, but the emptiness. The only thing I took from is a simple line that sums up the show and what it is about. “It’s just that I wasn’t happy.” Aspirations, expectations and satisfaction, all of these themes are swooped with ease, that goes unnoticed. And there lies its genius.