Finding love can be a challenge at the best of times.
But even more so when you’re Stuart, a single guy at the heart of HBO’s new eight part series Hello Ladies.
He’s a lonely, insecure Englishman labouring under the delusion that the fantasy life he imagines himself leading among the beautiful people of Los Angeles is in fact the one he is capable of having (or even truly wants if he was ever able to be honest with himself).
Try as he might he can’t land the woman of his dreams, a failure which has more to do with how he sees himself than how anyone sees him.
He is wildly overcompensating, with his idea of confidence coming across as crass, boorish and just plain rude at times.
And yet there is an endearing lost little puppy dog quality to him which leavens out all these unlikeable qualities and make you realise that he is, at heart, a nice guy, unaware of what he really wants.
This is how Stephen Merchant, who co-created (along with Ricky Gervais) and starred in the English version of The Office, and plays Stuart sees the character he has created and brought to life:
“He is very small town England but he has these fantasies of a world of glamour, of a world of beautiful women, of being able to get behind the velvet rope.
He’s a lonely person who is looking for love but he’s looking for it in the wrong places.”
Drawing on material from his stand up comedy routines, most notably 2012’s Stephen Merchant: Hello Ladies … Live!, Hello Ladies is the comedian’s big move into the US market.
It makes sense that Merchant struck a deal with HBO, a cable channel with a history of letting people with a unique creative talent and voice realise their vision intact.
It also helps greatly that he has teamed with Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the partnership behind the American incarnation of The Office, who penned the pilot episode of Hello Ladies with Merchant and acted as executive producers for the series.
It will be interesting to see if the series strikes a chord with audiences although I am fairly confident it will since many of us dive into the search for love with blinkers on, only losing them (if we lose them at all and sadly some people never do) after getting the romantic stuffing knocked out of us one too many times.
It’s only then we realise who we really are and what we actually want and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, as well as touching, to see Stuart go on that journey.
Hello Ladies starts its run on HBO on Sunday 29 September at 10.30pm.