It is perhaps inevitable that Broken News will be compared to The Day Today. Although The Day Today is probably the funnier of the two shows, I don't feel that this means Broken News should be written off as a waste of time. Both shows may be satirising the same subject, but they choose different ways to do it. Broken News perhaps stays closer to the real thing while The Day Today chooses to get a bit more surreal with the stories they report. Despite the similarity between the two shows, I don't get the feeling that Broken News is trying to copy The Day Today.
The back of the DVD box says the show satirises "the on-screen world of rolling news where there's too much airtime and not enough news to go around". That's a pretty accurate summary of the show and some of it is cringingly familiar. The recognisability of it makes it even funnier, especially when you then go back and watch the real news and see those things happening there. Some of the parody is actually pretty close to reality.
The show holds up to repeat viewing quite well. Many of the jokes are quite subtle and it's easy for them to slip past you the first time. There are also the ticker-tape messages scrolling across the bottom of the screen which you tend not to read the first time you watch an episode. I found these particularly funny in the "hijack" episode (which is also my favourite episode).
The large cast did help to lend an air of reality to the whole thing and virtually all of them were convincing. Having real Americans playing the American newscasters was also a nice touch which could have easily been overlooked.
My only complaint was that the same jokes did get used in several episodes. In some cases this worked well, but in other cases I did feel like hitting fast-forward. However, the "channel hopping" format of the show actually works in its favour here as it helps segments appear longer than they really are without drawing a joke out for too long.
If the BBC commission a second series, I hope they add more writers. I think there's certainly scope for more, although the stories would probably be more surreal in order to avoid going over too much of the same material from the first series.
The back of the DVD box says the show satirises "the on-screen world of rolling news where there's too much airtime and not enough news to go around". That's a pretty accurate summary of the show and some of it is cringingly familiar. The recognisability of it makes it even funnier, especially when you then go back and watch the real news and see those things happening there. Some of the parody is actually pretty close to reality.
The show holds up to repeat viewing quite well. Many of the jokes are quite subtle and it's easy for them to slip past you the first time. There are also the ticker-tape messages scrolling across the bottom of the screen which you tend not to read the first time you watch an episode. I found these particularly funny in the "hijack" episode (which is also my favourite episode).
The large cast did help to lend an air of reality to the whole thing and virtually all of them were convincing. Having real Americans playing the American newscasters was also a nice touch which could have easily been overlooked.
My only complaint was that the same jokes did get used in several episodes. In some cases this worked well, but in other cases I did feel like hitting fast-forward. However, the "channel hopping" format of the show actually works in its favour here as it helps segments appear longer than they really are without drawing a joke out for too long.
If the BBC commission a second series, I hope they add more writers. I think there's certainly scope for more, although the stories would probably be more surreal in order to avoid going over too much of the same material from the first series.
