WORDS Eva Short

Having sniffed out a successful formula, the creators of infamous and awkward teen sitcom The Inbetweeners have reunited and attempted to further milk this success in the form of new female-led E4 comedy Drifters. The show centres on three young women in Leeds clumsily trying to get their lives started after finishing university. They spend their time trying to eke out a living through menial work and internships, looking for a place to live and bemoaning their relationship faux-pas and general poverty. The subject matter is fertile breeding ground for laughs and sharp humour akin to its predecessor, and yet fails spectacularly. Far from the female answer to The Inbetweeners, this show is a catalogue of adventures in ineptitude, of three obnoxious buffoons newly ejected from the parental nest and floundering as a result.

The women are vastly different in their personalities and hence we are exposed to three flavours of unlikeable. There’s Lauren, the crass “slut” of the group; Bunny, whose vanity is only matched by her idiocy; and Meg, the one with her head relatively screwed on yet still irritatingly self-centred and petulant. The characters are not entertaining in their repugnance; their delivery is lazy and uninspired, and the plot lines they deal with are so extreme in their absurdity that they lose all art. Overall, the only reason anyone would want to watch this show is if they were looking for a half hour of derivative, dullard antics to subject themselves to in an act of masochism.