Cancel culture has been “crying out to be skewered on telly”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “Now, Steven Moffat has done it with ‘Douglas Is Cancelled’ (ITV), a spiky satire about sexism, hypocrisy, confected outrage and stellar careers being toppled by a single tweet.”
Hugh Bonneville plays Douglas, an “avuncular national-treasure anchorman” who gets drunk at a family wedding and is overheard making a “sexist joke”. Someone tweets about it; then “the shit hits the fan”.
Douglas insists he can’t remember what he said, though it seems in character; then things get “spicier” when his colleague Madeline (an “excellent” Karen Gillan) weighs in on the row. The four-parter is sometimes rather “on the nose”, but “mostly it is clever and sharp”, and its denouement is unexpected, which is a bonus.
The series is being marketed as a “comedy drama”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent, but the laughs are few and far between. And it’s annoying, too, that Gillan and Bonneville talk in newsroom clichés, such as: “The truth is useful, but I’d prefer something a little more balanced.” Douglas’s Gen Z daughter (Madeleine Power), meanwhile, is given “clunkers” such as: “Dad, I believe you – hashtag: total confidence.”
It starts out promisingly enough, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, but the plot soon becomes illogical; and the two main female characters are terribly written. Madeline is forced to deliver “atrocious speeches about feminism”, and Douglas’s wife (Alex Kingston) is a “harridan who hates Madeline because she is younger and has ‘blowjob eyes'”. Overall, it’s pretty “dreadful”.