Just how much can you hate your best friend? Peep Show revels in testing the boundaries of that question, and despite an excellent extended cast (including the likes of Olivia Coleman, Matt King, and Isy Suttie), the show is at its best when it strips everything else away and pits its two absurdly contrasting POV characters against one another. And their “Nether Zone” episode is the all-time epic cage match that takes Mark and Jeremy’s relationship to a whole new low.
Mark, the fastidious, rule-obsessed office drone, is late for his son’s christening and is picking up his best mate Jez, who is lounging around his boss’s apartment all alone after sleeping with said boss’s girlfriend. Jez’s rampant proclivities provides many of the show’s more panic-inducing situations for Mark, but this one seems to be going fine until the two try to leave. In a surreal turn of events, they find themselves trapped in the lobby, or the "nether zone," between the now locked second-floor apartment and the building's jammed front door.
Mark immediately panics, and after trying every other door in the building contemplates jumping from the second story window into a back alley, even if it means badly injuring himself. Jez is far too relaxed for all that and suggests they simply wait and play games to “get to know each other.” Having lived with Jez for years, Mark understandably finds this reaction lacking the requisite urgency.
Jez: “We need to relax.”
Mark: “We can't relax! We've got to fight, worry, speculate, tut, pace, swear!”
Jez: “Why?”
Mark: “Because it's an emergency, and in an emergency, you watch breaking news and count your tins of butter beans, you don't sit in the garden and put on Kiss FM!”
Jez: “Dude, we're here for the duration. Let's chill out.”
Mark: “We have an obligation to be anxious, it's a mark of respect for the gravity of the situation!”
Though Jez does ponder what will happen to them when the air runs out…of the lobby…of an apartment building. Mark is trapped with an idiot.
Their attempts to shout out the postal slot for help fail. No one answers their calls on Jez’s dying cell phone. The level of Mark’s pettiness is on full display when he takes a moment from panicking to mock Jez’s attempt to jimmy the apartment door open with a credit card by stating flatly, “That's a debit card.” Things get even more desperate when, after using his last call to order a pizza, Jez states he needs to urinate. Mark rightly nixes the idea to designate “an area” to use for such business, so Jez uses the postal slot, prompting Mark to decry this sudden “glory hole for urine.”
The pizza delivery arrives with no way to get it inside. Can you see where we’re headed? Jez has the carrier slide the slices through the letterbox, which is now laced with Jez's pee. This doesn't bother Jez but certainly disgusts Mark, for obvious reasons. It continues downhill from there, as one might expect.
They are eventually saved by Zahra, the noted girlfriend, but freedom comes with a cost. The boyfriend also arrives and Mark and Jez are forced to hide in the shower as he uses the toilet. Of course they’re discovered. They concoct a lie that they are gay lovers and they use the apartment as a secret meeting spot. The boss is confused as to why, since they live with each other already, to which Jez says he pretends to be him, the boss, when making love to Mark, as a kink. Mark, having heard enough, jumps out the second story window. Missing the christening, of course.
Mark couldn’t possibly hate Jez more, but as they discover at the end of every season, they’re all they really have to depend on in this world. And nothing says true friendship like eating letterbox pizza together in a random apartment building.
Mark: “A slice of bristly, cheese-free pizza, lightly brushed in your piss? How can I refuse?”
Jez: “What happens if you eat letterbox hair?”
Mark: “Strangely there's been very little research into that scenario.”
James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and the author of Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line (Gutter Snob Press) and We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine (Unknown Press), among other books of poetry and fiction. A graduate of a now defunct college in Vermont, formerly an editor of a now defunct art magazine in NYC, James currently resides in upstate NY where he writes reviews of independent bookstores for his yet-to-be-defunct blog, The Bookshop Hunter. For more, visit www.jameshduncan.com.