It's not easy being a white, middle-aged, middle-class heterosexual man these days. Although according to the new French Netflix comedy Shafted, which's just been added to the streamer, you at least get to drink champagne and live in a beautiful apartment with high ceilings and a breathtaking view of the Parisian skyline.
If you like your comedy with classy scenery, expensive clothes and well-sculpted beards Shafted will be right up your rue. This stylish six-part series, called Super Males in France and based on the Spanish hit Alpha Males (Machos Alfa), homes in on four men of a certain age clattering into a crisis. Cédric (Guillaume Labbé) for example, is a high-flying creative ad director brought down to earth when his boss decides to replace him with a young woman. His friends have their own issues. Tom (Manu Payet) is an illustrator suffering from a creative block following a break-up. Gendarme Jérémie (Antoine Gouy) dreams of being a mounted policeman. And promiscuous Tonio (Vincent Heneine) wants to settle down and propose to his divorce lawyer partner just as she decides she wants an open relationship.
So far, so first-world problems. It's also notable that the opening episode seems to be as fixated on men's buttocks as baguettes. From an early shot combining a pert derriere and the Eiffel Tower to a pants-free scene in the changing room after a manly bonding session of wall climbing, the camera has a habit of lingering lovingly on rears. Which, as far as I can work out, is not central to the plot.
The tone throughout is playful and sexy. Jérémie's main problem is his love life — in a particularly amusing if predictable set-piece an out-of-control Bluetooth-enabled sex toy causes much hilarity. It is so appealingly Gallic each episode should finish with a link to the Eurostar website There are reportedly other European adaptations in the pipeline, but not an English language one yet. I would imagine a British version would be very different. Instead of grey-templed men trying to spice things up in the bedroom, it would be geezers having prostate examinations and getting up in the night to go to the toilet. Here the first episode ends with one of the quartet taking out his bottled-up aggression with a mallet on a car windscreen, which results in them all being rounded up by the police and having to sit in a circle in a class to learn how to shake off their toxic masculinity and become better men. It's a post #metoo world and they need to learn to live in it.
There have, of course, already been British shows that have circled around masculinity and its problems. Cold Feet followed James Nesbitt's character Adam as he lurched awkwardly into middle age. And last year's BBC sitcom Daddy Issues saw divorced dad Malcolm, played by David Morrissey, going it alone. No enviable apartment and shiny brasseries here, just a bedsit with moldy yogurt in the fridge and microwave dinners from the late-night petrol station.
The closest comparison is probably Manchild, a BBC series that I can just about remember from the noughties in which Nigel Havers, Anthony Head, Don Warrington and Ray Burdis grappled with divorce, depression and sexual dysfunction. Of course at the time I didn't pay a lot of attention to it as the characters were pushing fifty, which seemed positively geriatric to me back then. I was keener on Charlie Higson’s satirical Fast Show character, Mid-Life Crisis Man, with his ponytail and piercings and desperation to stay young, which popped up in their outtakes special. Sometimes now as I squeeze into a pair of jeans that are a little too skinny for me I wonder if I'm in danger of turning into him. But, as I observed, they do things differently on the continent.
Shafted has a lot going for it. The central characters might not have much in the way of warmth or emotional depth but they do have plenty of panache and they know how to wear a scarf so that it looks catwalk smart and not found-in-a-skip scruffy. If you like to watch blokes grappling with being blokes but with quality tailoring, Shafted could have been made for you. And if you like buttocks popping up when you least expect them you'll love it.
Shafted is streaming on Netflix now in the US and UK.
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