Review by Frank Plowright
Never heard of a Worst Man? It’s elite service, a paid task in cases where someone is intent on disrupting a wedding, and a great idea for a comedy drama in any form. In this case Radcliffe Raleigh puts themselves up for hire, and in her mind a favour is owed to vindictive billionaire Valentina McElligott. Rad previously failed to prevent the marriage of her oldest daughter as love was true, and now she wants him to stop the marriage of her youngest daughter, but with barely any time for him to research and prepare.
Heiress Domino McElligott and her husband to be Battista Lovely are the happy couple, with the wedding scheduled for just over 24 hours on a remote island only big enough to host a sprawling hotel. Credit to Rad and his assistant, they’re all over the place evacuating staff and setting up cameras, except there are a couple of flies in the ointment. Multi-tasking Best Man Christopher Kafka is also in charge of catering and security, and pictured with Rad on the cover, while wedding planner Heather Frantick has also been hired by Valentina at short notice.
Ted Brandt and Ro Stein combine their talents both writing and drawing comics, hence the rather corporate sounding credit of Brandt&Stein. Read it with the right voice in your head and it’s not far removed from Frankenstein. Is this neat coincidence or a meta comment on their combined creative nature? Brandt&Stein go a little overboard with the allegorical names, but there’s little else misguided in what’s a densely rich sitcom experience on their part. Sharp, quick witted dialogue is combined with prime cartooning, and care is taken to introduce a large cast on a small island.
A confined space is a prime location for limiting the possibilities once things start happening. People under pressure and those concealing secrets mix with the seemingly innocent lacking any kind of agenda, and Valentina is beautifully written as a character a dog turd would hate. Via several well staged sequences, the best of them a selection of incredibly strained dinner table conversations, we know the cast well by the time things kick off. We’ve been primed not to like a fair few, while the groom seems to be an amiable idiot, yet the real skill is in providing fully rounded people, not just caricatures. Their stresses and foibles can be understood and by the end you’ll come to care for a fair few of them.
The fear is that with so many pages a good concept will run out of steam long before the end, but in the great British slapstick tradition the energy is maintained all the way through. Worst Man is great.
