Final Episodes of Episodes

Matt LeBlanc at Episodes season 5
premiere screening, Paley Center for Media
Beverly Hills, CA, August 16, 2017
Photo by Imeh Bryant /
 The Paley Center for Media

This Sunday, August 20, Showtime's brilliant comedy Episodes returns for its fifth and final season, of seven...well, episodes.  And having seen the screening of the first two installments of the season at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills the other night, I can tell you the show is back in fine form.  (In fact, while episode 1 was very, very funny, episode 2 is one of the series' best, right on par with the revelation of the "artwork" in Merc's blind ex-wife's living room.  Episode 2 was so screamingly funny that I actually missed some lines, drowned out by audience laughter, and will have to watch again.)

We pick up season 5 right where the season 4 left off:  Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig) are stuck working for their odious former assistant Tim (Bruce Mackinnon), who is now the showrunner on the new series he and Sean once came up with together.  Matt LeBlanc is hosting a cheesy game show for his old network, uneasily working with its producer, his nemesis Merc (John Pankow).  Having been fired after her affair with her boss Helen (Andrea Savage), Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins) is wallowing in seclusion at home.  And Morning?  (Mircea Monroe)  We don't know where she is yet -- but as Episodes' creator/writer/producers David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik revealed that night, she returns in episode 3.

Episodes creators/writers/producers
Jeffrey Klarik (l) and David Crane
Paley Center for Media, Beverly Hills
August 16, 2017
Photo by Imeh Bryant /
 The Paley Center for Media

As Crane and Klarik long ago revealed, they had the idea for their show years ago, after a bad experience working with CBS on their underappreciated sitcom The Class.  While they were pitching their show to the BBC, they deliberately set it in Hollywood, thinking -- wrongly, it turns out -- that they'd have to shoot it in L.A.  But ironically, the budget said otherwise.  And even with the injection of funds from partnering with Showtime, the producers found themselves recreating the look of L.A. in London, and living in the U.K. for up to six months to produce each season.  (Limited exterior shooting, plus post-production, is then done in real-life Los Angeles.)

For Sean and Beverly's show-within-the-show, Klarik and Crane -- partners in both writing and life -- wanted to take a smart, prototypical British setting, and dumb it down the way an American network might.  So they started with History Boys -- and then Klarik had an epiphany:  "Hockey!"  Having co-created and -produced all those seasons of Friends, Crane knew just who to approach to play a teacher as far as one can get from British propriety:  Matt LeBlanc.  (When that was revealed on the panel following Wednesday night's screening, LeBlanc feigned insult.  But both writers also revealed that had LeBlanc said no, they would have opted not to proceed with Episodes.  Well, Klarik joked, "maybe with David Schwimmer.")

Episodes panel at The Paley Center for Media, August 16, 2017:
l-r, creators David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, stars Mircea Monroe,
Kathleen Rose Perkins and Matt LeBlanc,
 moderator Jarett Wieselman of Buzzfeed News

Episodes cast and creators
The Paley Center for Media, Beverly Hills
August 16, 2017

Photo by Imeh Bryant /

 The Paley Center for Media

Other burning questions arose on the panel, such as Morning's real age (even Klarik and Crane don't know, and we love it that way); Myra's constipated noises (which actress Daisy Haggard performs brilliantly, and which Klarik sweetens even more with his own whines in post-production); and Carol's attraction to authority figures, whether they be male or female (a plot point which Perkins says she was told as far back as season 1, and couldn't wait to play.)  And while fans have speculated for seasons now whether the characters of Merc, Carol, Myra, Andy (Joseph May) and others might correlate to any real-life network execs, Crane and Klarik do admit that two characters, Sean and Beverly, are directly modeled on real people -- namely, them.


"I'm like Sean, thinking the glass is half-full," Crane says.  Then, pointing to Klarik, he adds, "And he thinks the glass is an idiot."

David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik on Episodes panel
The Paley Center for Media, Beverly Hills
August 16, 2017

Episodes returns to Showtime Sunday, August 20 at 10 PM Eastern/Pacific