I'm not sure how many years I have read and watched Charlie Brooker's work – it certainly must be over a decade of reading his Guardian column and other works through to more recent work such as Black Mirror and this. Although his style and humor is fairly consistent, I always enjoy it. That is why this season of Weekly Wipe disappointed me a little bit because I did feel that it lacked a certain freshness in its material – hard to put a finger on why, but this third season was not quite as good as previous outings and it is not just my familiarity with the approach.
The good thing is that the season is actually still very good. It has plenty of great lines, plenty of great cynicism, and most of its content is well chosen and works. Brooker's sections (which are the majority) remain funny, acerbic, and well observed, with plenty of laughs. I think the season lacks some really good subjects to get into, and at times the easy digs at politicians, soaps and adverts did feel like it was almost not enough to draw the best from the writers in the way it does when interspersed with much stronger or more interesting material. Again, it is not that it is not funny or clever, it is just that it feels a little like it deserves better and to a degree is showing up rather than excelling. In the supporting sections the results are variable. Shitpeas and Cunk are fun characters that remain well written and performed – even if again there is not quite the spark they have with some of the content. The World of Wonder sections remain very funny and delivered, as does Jake Yapp's condensed versions of things. The sections from Robinson are sadly mostly average at best; as Brand or teen blogger Zeb there is not a lot of variety beyond the main joke, and she has too much time for too little content – although in fairness she is not helped by the fact that her characters are essentially unlikeable twonks, which puts additional pressure on the comedy to work to compensate – but it doesn't do this enough to cover it.
Although it is only a typically short handful of episodes, the final one is essentially clip show of the episodes that had gone before, with a few bits that didn't make the cut previously. Even watching the season spread over a month as it screened, the time gap is not sufficient to justify watching the material again, and it is hard not to feel like this final episode is a case of them not being bothered to even fill a season. This is probably not the case, but hard not to feel that way when the season is so short already.
I did laugh regularly through the season, and found it to be typically what I expected from Brooker, but there did seem like a lack of spark in this season that I had not seen in his other work, and some aspects which did not work at all well (characters or the clip show) did not help this feeling at all. Still worth watching for what it does even though other work shows it should have been better.
