The F1rst Team Season One Review

The F1rst Team is the latest sitcom made by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, the mind behind The Inbetweeners and White Gold. They have moved on from suburban teenagers and 1980s Essex to a struggling Premier League team.

The F1rst Team focuses on three young players at the club. There is Mattie Sullivan (Jake Short), a new signing from the MLS, hot prospect Jack Turner (Jack McMullen), and recent youth team graduate Benji Achebe (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). Despite living the dream, they still face pitfalls like a legendary manager losing the plot, a psychotic captain, embarrassing incidents, and a PR department who has to clean up after them.

The Inbetweeners was a big hit and White Gold was well received, so Beesley and Morris have developed a lot of goodwill over the years. Sadly, The F1rst Team was a more torturous experience. Beesley and Morris were clearly trying to recapture some of that Inbetweeners magic. Mattie was like Will, both were put in a new environment and tried to be the voice of reason whilst Jack and Benji were as thick as Neil with Benji having some of Jay’s arrogance. The role of Petey Brooks (Theo Barklem-Biggs) was pretty much Donovan if given a more prominent role, and there was reliance on cringe comedy. Cringe outweigh the comedy.

There were bits I liked in the show. Some jokes I chuckled at were at the sexual harassment meeting, stories about a wanking competition, and when Petey threaten someone in the final episode. As the show progressed there were some attempts at emotional depth due to Jack’s relationship with his dad, a man the young player is loyal to even though the father just used his son for information.

Theo Barklem-Biggs, who I previously saw in Make Up, knows how to play a despicable character. In The F1rst Team he was more than a bully with a violent temper, he was downright evil. Tamla Kari as the club’s head of PR was a fun presence and I would have liked to have seen a series focused on her, a woman who has to clean up all the messes of the pampered man-children.

The F1rst Team’s issues were relatability and likeability. The Inbetweeners focused on four teenage boys as they struggled to become popular, finding ways to have sex and avoid embarrassment. Audience members could relate to some of the things they did and may have done some of the things they did. The F1rst Team’s main characters were rich footballers and two were barely functioning adults. Mattie was meant to the relatable character because he was the straight man, but he was so whiny that I wanted to shout at him ‘grow a pair’. The main four in The Inbetweeners could be selfish and be awful to each other, but this was compensated by their friendship. The F1rst Team didn’t have that. It didn’t help that the main actors weren’t convincing in their roles.

Iain Morris seems to continue the thesis he had in The Festival: people are arseholes. Many of the characters were just awful. An example of this was in the third episode where after a big misunderstanding the trio were forced to take an entitled and spoilt teenager around the training ground. It made the series difficult to watch where there were so many unlikeable characters and the few good people suffered in some way.

The series also had a dark progression in the series. Some of it was done for humour, like Jack’s gambling addiction and an ex-footballer finding his life has no meaning after retirement. Some actions were pure cruelty, like what happened in the final episode.

The F1rst Team did have an air of cheapness to it. This happened despite the series being filmed at Charlton’s stadium and training ground and the series having access to the BBC’s pundits and commentators like Gary Lineker. The series tried to avoid showing much of the wealth and luxury that most of these players would live in: their homes were spartan, they went to Laser Quest and Frankie and Benny’s for a meal. This cheapness was evident by the kits the team wore: they looked like the knockoffs you get from tourist trap shops, not the genuine article. Other fictional teams had convincing-looking kits i.e. Harchester United. The F1rst Team had Will Arnett as a part of the cast which leads to the question did the show spend a big portion on the budget getting him?

Considering the quality of the talent involved The F1rst Team was a huge disappointment. It suffered from an ill-fitting style of humour and unbearable characters.