www.RICHARDCOYLE.com

"A farce repeating itself"
With the new run of Coupling, creator Steven Moffat deftly avoids TV's dreaded second-series syndrome.

Sports psychologists recognise the problem of second-season syndrome. A footballer or cricketer who has achieved freely as a debutant struggles the following year when veteran professionals learn to anticipate certain tricks with the ball which worked best when unexpected. The rookies are said to have been "found out." The same can happen in culture with second novels and albums, follow-up series, movie sequels. There's a significant difference between being surprised by how good something fresh is and sitting down expecting excellence. An unanticipated hit of last year's schedules, Steven Moffat's Coupling (Monday, 10pm, BBC2) - half-hour farces about sex - returns with a Silver Rose of Montreux, enthusiastic reviews from Guardian and Sun and the desperate expectations of millions of viewers including this one.

Fans can breathe out now, assuming that there's enough puff in the lungs after laughing. These new episodes are a perfect example of the more benevolent form of second-season syndrome, in which the talent is given ever greater confidence and invention by success and the audience gains further rewards from familiarity with the character. The biggest technical problem in a second series is negotiating an entrance to the action for both knowing viewers and new ones pulled in by the fuss. The first ten minutes of the second series of Coupling could be cited at laughter school as a case of impeccable recapping. The names and key personality details of the characters are established without the kind of dialogue which feels like people at a conference walking round with name-badges.
Steve (Jack Davenport) battles to balance the man ners of his middle-class upbringing with a dedicated interest in sex and pornography. Susan (Sarah Alexander), a traffic-stopping blonde, is the woman of his dreams but raises the nightmare that she might discover what he's like beneath.

Each partner has a chorus of two friends. Steve's are Jeff (Richard Coyle), a Welshman with an adolescent obsession with breasts, and Patrick (Ben Miles), an effortless sexual conquerer who has the kind of one-night stands Steve must convince himself he no longer needs because of Susan. Her best friends are Sally (Kate Isitt), a snob terrified of ageing, and Jane (Gina Bellman), a radio traffic-reporter whose own mental highway has been closed to normal traffic for years.
Coupling has been compared - both favourably and unfavourably - with Friends but really shares only the subject matter of twentysomething love. The English series is both filthier and twistier. The point about Moffat is that, unusually among television sitcom writers, he works in the genre of farce. Critics have often suggested that farce is impossible to write in a contemporary setting because the plot motor of the form - the need to lie to prevent loss of face or exposure - is implausible in a society which has ever less sense of shame. What Moffat has understood is that there remains one area in which people are desperate to impress and terrified of revelation: dating.

The first episode of the second series is called The Man With Two Legs, which is a small example of Moffat's ability to make the everyday become bizarre. How could it be noteworthy that a person has a pair of limbs? Within 30 minutes, we fully understand why it's worth mentioning that someone is a bi-ped.
As often in Coupling's best episodes, two sticks grasped by the wrong end are rubbed together to make a fire of embarassment. Jeff, commuting to work, has become erotically obsessed with a woman whose high-heeled leg is all he has seen in the passenger scrum. When she finally sits opposite him, he blurts out an impeccable double-entendre: "It's nice to see your legs together for once." Required to explain his obsession with her legs, he lies that he is an amputee. He notices in others what he lacks himself.

Viewers who just don't get farce will object that the situation and dialogue are a contrivance. But the set-up merely exaggerates a truth - the lies and evasions we use to attract others - to place Jeff in an extreme dilemma which follows naturally from his character. As the girl on the train responds to his flirting - it turns out she admires him because her brother has lost a leg - a bloke obsessed with getting his leg over has left himself unable to do so. As Jeff laments: "I meet the girl of my dreams and I can't take my trousers off."

With impeccable symmetry, the second mis-grasped stick also involves a fib told in the game of dating. The status-obsessed Sally has confided that her new boyfriend is a surgeon. In fact, he's a butcher. The resultant misunderstandings with her friends - "How did you meet Sally?" "At work. She's one of my best customers" - lead to the secondary misconception that he must be a cosmetic surgeon. The climax - in which a man in a pub begs a butcher to slice him off beneath the knee - highlights Moffat's ability to make an impossible event seem the logical outcome.

The Man With Two Legs takes its place alongside an episode in series one - in which half the dialogue was in Hebrew - in my favourite couple of Couplings. Fans of naturalism may find the plots too manufactured.

It's true that next week's episode, My Dinner In Hell, depends on a wilful misunderstanding of the words "solo" and "whistling", but that edition ends with a man presenting his girlfriend's mother with a gift-wrapped vibrator in perfectly plausible circumstances. This follow-up series of Coupling is an example of farce repeating itself, the second time as television history.