This show is the televisual equivalent of musical talents of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards.
Just as Garth Marenghi and Dean Learner were created by Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards were created by Jo Stafford and her husband, pianist and arranger Paul Weston as musical alter egos.
While one doesn’t have to be a musician to appreciate how hard it really is to purposefully play and sing out of tune so consistently as the Edwards did, their musical choices and frenetic stops and starts are particularly funny to classically trained musicians.
The same is true with Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place.
Holness’ performance gives a sincerity to Garth Merenghi that makes him completely believable as a real person, but then to take it a step further to imagine how Merenghi would embody and perform his own alter ego in the form of Dr. Rick Dagless M.D., again with such sincerity, elevates the comedy to an entirely unique level of satire.
From the point of view of someone who has worked in TV production as well as live theater, this show’s purposeful amateurish style strikes me as particularly funny as I know it takes a lot of observation and talent to be so consistently ‘bad’ on so many levels. For example, when Dr. Rick Dagless M.D. stares out the window, the camera is positioned outside looking back into the room. We clearly see Rick’s face and the person he’s talking to in the background. Then, when the angle changes, and we’re inside the room looking at Rick from the point of view of the person in the room, we see him standing at the window looking out, BUT THERE ARE BLINDS ON THE WINDOW!! That may seem like a mistake, but withing the double-meta layer of satire, the director, Garth Marenghi, didn’t have a production designer keeping track of continuity.
Of course, there are other examples of purposefully bad acting and terrible looking stunts, but in order to really understand and appreciate everything one is seeing while watching, you have to be aware that every mistake is on purpose and part of the entire joke.
Ultimately, every level of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place can be appreciated as deliberately hilarious and cleverly genius in execution. Perhaps Dan Harmon’s meta-awareness comes close, but I don’t think we’ll see anything that approaches the level of self-aware-awful goodness like it.