For four hours a day, for 100 total hours of court ordered community service, these seven people are her charges who are tasked with cleaning up a decayed community center in hopes of restoring it to use for...you guessed it, the community. What the seven get up to when they're not pushing brooms and filling trash bags and wheelbarrows with detritus, is dramatic and as funny as when they're forced to spend time with each other for those four hours a day wearing their day-glow orange vests that identify them as inmates of a sort doing community service with "Community Payback" stenciled on the vests' back. (I'm guessing not Saturdays and Sundays. I'm not familiar with community service.)
Anyone who watches a fair a share of British produced shows knows they depict mixed marriages as often as not. And this one is no exception. Rani, is the young, hopefully Oxford-bound student, who has a shoplifting addiction for nice girly things that her mother discourages her from having since studying is of paramount importance. Rani says her library books have been out more often than her. The studying works, to the mother's delight, because Rani is going to enter Oxford on a full scholarship, as her mother likes to tell anyone who doesn't even ask. Asians aren't the only Tiger Moms.
Her mother, an Indian, is married to a Polish plumber who got out of Communist Poland and came to the U.K. Rani theorizes she shoplifts for things to find freedom. She claims her father, educationally stern like her mother, only thinks freedom is something he had in Communist Poland when he got hold of a can of Pepsi. Rani is fun-repressed, and sentenced to community service when the mall security cameras finally nail her stuffing her bag with glitzy swag she only hopes to someday wear. Off she goes for four hours a day.
As the credits unfold for The Outlaws the actors names are not very recognizable to an American audience, until Christopher Walken's name appears prominently at the end of the scroll. Walken is now 79, looking every bit of it, but still possessing that demeanor, strut, and voice of someone who is still trying to convince you of something. Can it really be 44 years since he was in The Deer Hunter?
Walken is Frank, who doesn't try to be British, because he's not. He's a Yank. He tells his fellow probation buddies that he came to England in 1971 to avoid the draft and Vietnam and stayed and raised a family. His daughter tells her kids that Walken is a lying, thieving gambling, drinking mass of protoplasm that only thinks of himself, and most of all, cannot be trusted. She pounds this profile of grandad into her two children because he's coming to spend time with them while he's on his electronic monitoring ankle device while on parole. And parole of course involves community service at the wrecked community center. And a 7:00 P.M. curfew.
Walken's parole and probation comes after serving 18 months for check forgery, a crime he doesn't really think was a crime, but was more like a "misunderstanding." So be it. His daughter distrusts him so much that when she drives her son to school and leaves the car with Walken in the back seat she instructs her teenage son to stay by the car when she briefly leaves it so that Walken doesn't leap into the front and steal the vehicle. "He can't be trusted."
In one of those coincidences in life, as I was settled in to the first episode of The Outlaws, I noticed in Friday's WSJ Mansion section that they were featuring Christopher Walken in their weekly piece on where people grew up. I didn't know he was a New Yorker, coming from Astoria and was of German descent and grew up in his family bakery. His mother was starstruck, and basically took him to auditions for child parts in the '50s as TV needed child actors to fill the parts in the family sitcoms that were being produced. No end to what you learn.
John is the son of an Irish father who built until now a successful brake pad business. But the factory is floundering, and John is attempting to sell the family business, or at least get some foreign investment. He is conservative and struggles with the trend toward wokeness and designating pronouns. I don't think it's clear why John is doing community service, but here he is.
Myrna is a older black woman who is a leftover from the protesting '70a and '80's who is now marginalized by the newer Black Lives Matter people and their approach to protest. She also harbors a deep regret. She's there because she hitched a parked police Outreach trailer to her vehicle with two officers inside as she drove through Bristol shouting about police racism through a bull horn. She's been doing this sort of thing for decades.
Christian is an affable young black boy, about Rani's age, who is left caring for his 15 year-old sister in a council flat after the drug addicted mother could no longer provide care. He is trying mightily to keep her away from the gangs, but he himself finds he's at their beck and call. There is a twist as to why he's there, as he provides the central plot surrounding a duffel bag filled with the Queen's currency. Life changingly filled to the top.
There is Lady Gabby, the Kardashian/Lindsay Lohan character famous for being famous, followed everywhere by the paparazzi, who is assigned community service for keying her girlfriend's car with the word "Skank" after their breakup. She has anger issues, and doesn't take rejection easily. She has 1.2 million social media followers, but no friends
Then there is Greg, played by Stephen Merchant who co-wrote the series with Elgin James and who co-produces the series and directs episodes. Stephen Merchant is a 6'7" comedic tower that is this generation's John Cleese. On talk shows, Stephen tells us that the idea for the series came to him because his parents were community service supervisors, and Stephen grew up observing the vast array of types of people that came through that system.
Stephen Merchant is well-known in the U.K. as a creator and star of The Office. His character Greg winds up with assigned hours because he backed his car into a police car in a parking lot as he attempted to evade questions about his presence there with a young woman in the passenger seat who was performing a sexual favor on him. Greg is a struggling, divorced lawyer who has trouble getting anything right at the office. He is their punching bag, facing termination.
The end of Episode Six reveals another star of he series, but that would be revealing a spoiler. Check the credits as they roll.
The great news about this delightful six-part series is that there will be another delightful six-part series as Season Two. It's already in the can. Stay tuned.
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