Sam Campbell’s new sitcom Make That Movie has just been given an unusually lofty review: the funniest TV show of the entire year. For a series built around Campbell playing a version of himself, once a big shot movie director now rattling around in a van with a giant model film camera on top, that is about as loud a launch as television comedy gets.
The attention matters because Campbell is already a known name to viewers from Taskmaster and Last One Laughing, where he spent years turning comic chaos into a signature. Here, he has taken that same energy into a high-concept mockumentary about film production, and each episode runs for 23 minutes. The result is being talked about not as a tidy sitcom but as a very specific comic machine, the kind that can turn a fake movie pitch into a running joke that seems to keep accelerating.
What makes Make That Movie stand out is how hard it commits to its own nonsense. In the first episode, Campbell’s character is pulled into a Da Vinci Code-style thriller about a couple who both change into snakes. In another, pensioners set out to make a Lawnmower Man-style cyber-thriller about online scammers, then physically enter computers by singing songs and putting USB cables into their mouths. Animated feet are used to cheer up a couple trapped in a cave. It is daft on purpose, and supremely so.
That comic excess is also where the friction comes in. The show is being praised as hilarious, but it is also described as containing not a single identifiable human emotion. That gap is part of the point: Campbell’s world is full of strange productions, fake prestige and absurd visual ideas, yet stubbornly short on ordinary feeling. Even when the series wanders into cultural confusion about life in England, or leaves Campbell visibly baffled by the country’s affection for films about football hooliganism, it keeps choosing escalation over sentiment.
Campbell, who is Australian by birth, has made a career out of unsettling the formats he enters. On Taskmaster, he performed a genuinely unhinged song about female comedians. On Last One Laughing, he dressed up as a giant bird. The review argues that he has destroyed and rebuilt both shows in his own image, and Make That Movie carries the same instinct into fiction: a world that worships the kind of fascinatingly bad movie it is mocking, with Birdemic: Shock and Terror as the reference point for one of the worst films ever made.
That is why the review’s final verdict lands so hard. It says the show deserves to be paraded around the streets and should run and run, which is less like a polite recommendation than a declaration that Campbell has found a format built to hold his most outlandish ideas. The unresolved question is whether viewers beyond the review page will follow it there when Make That Movie reaches a wider audience on HBO Max.
