Douglas Is Cancelled Review: Gillan Is Great In Unfunny "Comedy"

A Career-Best Performance From Karen Gillan Can’t Save the Uncomfortable, Unfunny Douglas Is Cancelled

Most television enthusiasts are familiar with the name Steven Moffat because of blockbuster series like Doctor Who and Sherlock, famous for their breakneck dialogue, outsize monologues, and knotty, occasionally nonsensically twisty plotting. His subsequent, less well-known efforts, shows like the bizarre Bram Stoker adaptation Dracula and convoluted crime series Inside Man, feature many of the same familiar narrative tricks and tendencies, though both collapse under the weight of their own ambitions by their respective ends. So it may surprise you to learn that his latest effort swerves in a completely different direction. Ostensibly a workplace dramedy about cancel culture and the perils of modern-day media, the BritBox series Douglas Is Cancelled is a strange fit for a public moment that includes everything from the spiraling of the #MeToo movement to the political backlash against ongoing DEI efforts. It’s also, unfortunately, not very good.

It would be one thing if the series had anything interesting to say about the fraught moment in which we find ourselves, handled its complicated subject matter with anything approaching nuance, or was even an especially compelling story underneath it all. But the show stumbles badly under the weight of its own weirdly judgemental hubris, and the end result is a comedy drama that is neither particularly funny nor especially incisive. Its themes are clumsy, its story painfully unsubtle, and its humor heavy-handed and often borderline cruel. It’s the sort of show that most likely never would have seen the light of day if it didn’t have someone of Moffat’s stature behind it, and one has to wonder who, in the year of our Lord 2025, thought making an alleged comedy about cancel culture and sexual harassment (because that is, also, what this story is secretly about) was something that anyone wanted.

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The story follows the eponymous Douglas Bellowes (Hugh Bonneville), a beloved British national newscaster who hosts a popular current affairs show with his much younger presenting partner Madeline Crow (Karen Gillan). But when a tweet from someone who overheard him making a sexist joke at a wedding goes viral, his reputation immediately begins to spiral. What was the joke? Douglas can’t remember. And you won’t find out until the end of the series, because Douglas’s joke is not the point, or even really a joke in the strictest sense; it’s everyone else’s reaction to it. As media vultures, social media influencers, and cancel culture fiends begin to circle, Douglas’s sleazy producer Toby (Ben Miles), self-interested agent (Simon Russell Beale), tabloid editor wife Sheila (Alex Kingston), and even Madeline herself all jump in to try and help control the larger public narrative.

In reality, Douglas Is Cancelled is two different series fighting under a blanket. For the first half, it’s an awkward comedy that seems to delight in punching down, moving through a veritable laundry list of painful stereotypes and smug proselytizing. This runs the gamut from its depiction of the Bellowes’ 19-year-old daughter Claudia (Madeleine Power) as a Gen Z caricature who constantly shouts about microaggressions and mansplaining to Sheila’s constantly anxious personal assistant who can’t look her in the eye without running to HR to complain about it and the random appearance of Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed as a vaguely sexist in-house network comedy writer who, much like the rest of this show, doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a joke. (“Twitter? More like Twatter!”) To its credit, the series does get the flustered panic around the frighteningly nebulous idea of “cancellation” spot on, and the crackling back-and-forth dialogue is certainly fun to watch, if occasionally cringe-worthy if you think about it too hard.

But the series takes a sharp turn in its back half, shifting from being a vaguely satirical take-down of cancel culture and woke excess into a more deliberate and uncomfortable story of the long-tail impact of trauma. If its first two episodes are Douglas’s story, the final pair are Madeline’s, and the idea that any of this is meant to be funny is finally and fervently put to rest. As Madeline’s history and motivations unravel in unexpected, emotional, and occasionally shocking ways, Gillan’s performance contains multitudes, carefully navigating a tightrope of ambition, rage, optimism, and anxiety. She’s outstanding throughout, turning in some of the best work she’s ever done and often using little more than shifting facial expressions to elevate some of the series’ clunkier dialogue. (It’s not Gillan’s fault that Madeline gets stuck with some truly wretched speeches about the meaning of feminism, but whew.) Her performance in the series’ third episode, essentially a fraught two-hander full of steadily increasing tension and near physical dread, is steal-your-breath good. But it’s not enough, and the show’s larger point—if you can call it that—winds up as something far afield from where we started.

To their credit, it’s the excellent cast that holds this show together, with actors turning in performances that are often better than the material they are given deserves. You’ve seen this sort of vaguely bumbling posh everyman bit from Bonneville before, but it’s reliably great, a cross between Paddington’s Mr. Brown and W1A’s Ian Fletcher. Miles’s performance is uncomfortably icky as a television executive who has only a passing relationship with the concept of truth, and while Kingston is repeatedly saddled with some of the show’s worst writing—her character’s horrendously cliche hatred of Madeline is nothing short of exhausting—she throws herself into the one-note nature of her role with enviable gusto. (It helps that she gets some of the series’ actually funny lines.)

Clocking in at just four episodes (all of which were available for review), there’s a brisk momentum to the story that helps make Douglas Is Cancelled an easy and oftentimes quite enjoyable watch. While some of the dialogue is deeply cringeworthy, there’s a sort of Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk patina to a lot of it that feels true to an industry that’s constantly spinning both the truth and its proverbial wheels. And there are certainly moments when its skewering of the contemporary media environment strikes painfully true. But at the end of the day, the story chooses to use a metaphorical sledgehammer in place of anything that resembles nuance and rejects complexity in favor of easy-to-digest moral platitudes and an ending that feels like it’s wandered in from a different series. There’s likely a good drama to be made out of the thorny mess that is cancel culture. But this one certainly isn’t it.

Douglas Is Cancelled premieres Thursday, March 6 on BritBox.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

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A Career-Best Performance From Karen Gillan Can’t Save the Uncomfortable, Unfunny Douglas Is Cancelled