Dead Pixels, E4

Millennials in boring McJobs who spend their leisure hours (and a good proportion of their working hours) playing online fantasy role-playing games probably aren’t the intended audience for this six-part comedy – which, on the basis of Thursday’s opening episode, is just as well. I doubt they’d think its treatment of their preoccupations or its playful skewering of their moral priorities either accurate or fair. And though it’s hard to say what demographic E4 thinks it’s serving these days, writer Jon Brown was penning episodes of Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please over a decade ago, so it’s my guess that it’s parents of Millennials rather than their offspring who’ll be nodding and laughing as they find their own prejudices about online gaming reinforced.

Cutting edge Dead Pixels isn’t, then. But in the same way that Peep Show re-reruns will always be brilliant, there’s an evergreen appeal to the world of the geek and these geeks are drawn at least as well as cosplay-loving Dobbie, David Mitchell’s on-off girlfriend in Peep Show. Brown’s other writing credits include Fresh Meat and MisFits, so there’s no doubting his comic abilities or his TV-land street cred.

Our geek-in-chief is Meg (Alexa Davies, who played Aretha in the excellent and sorely-missed Raised By Wolves and the young Julie Walters in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again). She’s addicted to a game called Kingdom Scrolls and is rarely without a headset, which means her graphic running commentary about her sexual desires is shared with fellow gamers Nicky (Will Merrick) and – somewhere in the US and always wearing shorts – Usman (Sargon Yelda). While Meg and Nicky are at work, he’s at home neglecting his young children in order to bash bears and fight dragons, which seems to be the main activity in Kingdom Scrolls. “It’s basically Final Fantasy online for people who aren’t pompous f***heads,” Meg explains to new colleague Russell (David Mumeni), the object of her lust. That’s before she murders his character and steals its gold.

Inverting the norms, it’s Meg’s sporty, pretty flatmate Alison (Charlotte Ritchie, from Fresh Meat) who’s cast as the loser. She has a boyfriend and eats salad and has bought herself a flute in order to teach herself an instrument. So yes, total loser.

The script is rude and funny, particularly when Meg is over-sharing on the subject of her planned sexual conquest of Russell, which took up a substantial chunk of the first episode. But the show’s USP is its extensive use of animated sequences to show the friend’s in-game avatars interacting. It’s a neat touch, particularly when real-world discussions find their way into the mouths of, say, a pink lion with a lime green mohawk.

TV highlights: Raised By Wolves

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