Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou’ On Netflix, Always Looking On The Awkward Side Of Life

With no fourth season of Stath Lets Flats on the horizon just yet, the British cringe comedy’s star/creator has gotten most of the gang back together for this hodgepodge of sketches instead. Will it suffice for Stath fans, or will it just leave you wishing they’d given us a new season?

A WHOLE LIFETIME WITH JAMIE DEMETRIOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jamie Demetriou, previously seen in Fleabag before his breakthrough creating, co-writing and starring in Stath Lets Flats (for which he won three BAFTAs in 2020), has assembled a dozen of his cast mates — including Al Roberts, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Ellie White, and Katy Wix — for a 52-minute collection of sketches, loosely arranged in a three-act chronological structure: Youth, Adulthood, Golden Years. Hence, “A Whole Lifetime” of vignettes designed and displayed by an unseen narrator to explain to an unborn child what he’s bound to expect out of life as a human.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: The obvious parallel is Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

Memorable Jokes: The best sketch is perhaps the simplest, an office where Demetriou’s character keeps getting his bag stuck on the door as he enters each morning.

The most pointed sketch takes aim at British media’s obsession with the royal family, and notions that it’s only when the royals are happy that Britons are happy.

Our Take: Tonal looseness works both for and against this collection.

Demetriou’s take on youth didn’t quite take with me, leaving me wanting to hurry up to get to the next batch of sketches.

At times, it also felt less reminiscent of Monty Python, and more akin to Tim Robinson’s brand of cringe, particularly in two scenes featuring Demetriou as the odd man out. In one, he’s in a pub playing Kiernan, the would-be best man whose insecurity about planning his mate’s stag party and living up to the traditional toxic masculinity of such affairs finds him buckling under the weight of it all. In another, he’s in a backyard among other parents and kids in a much more casual gathering, but his Jeff feels like he’s a seemingly bad dad in comparison, and that compare-and-despair prompts him first to attempt to strangle the other dads, then to sing gruffly about his plight.

A parody of British dating shows, “Kiss Villa,” on the other hand, has surprisingly little new or surprising to say on the genre.

Purposefully symbolic or not, Demetriou does seem to have something to say about our obsession with our cell phones and social media. Less so about the youth. But when it comes to our elders who may feel left behind by the kids and their text threads, he shows up as a tech wizard to say, there’s nothing to see here.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s enough here for any Stath fan to love, and anyone unfamiliar with Demetriou to go looking for more afterward. There are times like these, however, where I might wish sketch comedy collections had chapter dividers so you could SKIP more easily past the less effective scenes.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.