Shearsmith and Pemberton set themselves a hard brief, a new story every half hour, and meet it far more often than they miss. Tight, cruel, funny and unexpectedly sad; the weakest episodes are the ones that exist only to reach their final shot.
Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have been writing together since The League of Gentlemen, and Inside No. 9 is the best thing they have made. Each episode lasts 29 minutes, takes place behind a door numbered nine, and has nothing to do with the one before. They wrote all 53 episodes across nine series, from the first on 5 February 2014 to the run that began on 8 May 2024, and most of them are good.
The first episode puts a dozen people in a wardrobe. It is an engagement party, somebody suggests a game of sardines, and the guests squeeze in beside the coat hangers. David Kerr directs it as a room that keeps getting smaller: every new arrival brings a grievance, and we knew something in that house was wrong before anyone said so. The second episode is a burglary without a word of dialogue, two thieves after a painting in the glass house of Gerald (Denis Lawson) and Sabrina (Oona Castilla Chaplin). Between them they tell you what the programme is for: a format so tight that each episode has to find a new way to be a television play.
The cinematographers change (John Sorapure, Mattias Nyberg, James Mather and Stephan Pehrsson) but the frame is nearly always a room: a hotel corridor, a dressing room, a parlour with the curtains drawn. Simon Rodgers, Brian Sykes and the other production designers build a world into a single set and then let the script take it apart. Christian Henson’s title music is the one constant, a nursery tune that sounds as if the clockwork is running down. Cat Gregory and Joe Randall-Cutler cut to the half hour without fat; we cannot name an episode that would be better at forty minutes.
Shearsmith and Pemberton act in almost every episode, usually as men too pleased with themselves or too frightened to say what they mean. The first series has Timothy West, Anna Chancellor, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Denis Lawson, Gemma Arterton and Kayvan Novak, and none of them plays it as a favour to friends. West, sitting in the wardrobe with a lifetime of dignity and nowhere to put it, is the reason the opener plays as drama rather than sketch.
The programme is sold on its twists, and that undersells it. The best half hour in the second series, The Twelve Days of Christine, follows one woman through twelve days of her adult life, and we knew something was coming. It came anyway. We sat through the closing credits without speaking, and what did it was not the ending but everything before it: a hallway, a party, a Christmas tree, none of it staged as important, all of it mattering by the end.
The weakest episodes are the ones you can feel being written backwards from their final shot, where the people are arranged rather than alive and the last thirty seconds are the only reason the first twenty-eight minutes exist. The later series have more of them, because the audience now expects to be fooled and the writers know it. The verse episode Zanzibar, which most critics loved, struck us as too pleased with its own scansion; we admired it and did not laugh much.
Set against Psychoville and The League of Gentlemen, this is the pair’s most controlled work. There are no recurring grotesques and no prosthetics; when either of them is funny here it is because of a line, not a nose. Underneath the horror dressing, these are plays about English people in rooms, being polite to one another for as long as they can manage, which is never quite long enough.
Watch it one episode at a time, and never two in a row. Taken in bulk the twists start to look like a habit; taken singly they still work, nine series on. Start with the wardrobe.
