Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
From raunchy teen classics like Eurotrip to reality gems like An Idiot Abroad, there are few things more fun than a good travel comedy. Hulu’s latest acquisition, the E4-produced Gap Year, is a delightful and endearing extension of the genre. Through the stories of five foreigners backpacking through Asia, Gap Year gives this often silly genre an endearing but relatable energy.
Part of Gap Year’s charm comes from how vaguely believable it is and how perfectly it captures the conflicting emotions that define traveling abroad. The series starts with Janeane Garofalo, playing a travel journalist, rebuking the series’ two lead characters for their decision to take a bro vacation in China. The best friend pair Dylan (Anders Hayward) and Sean (Ade Oyefeso) look stunned as she quickly explains there’s absolutely nothing for them in China and that they’re idiots for even trying. “Have fun in Thailand,” she snarkily but wisely predicts before leaving them. That’s where Gap Year starts, with two best friends trying to take a stag vacation in a country not known for its bars, beaches, or babes. They’re immediately out of touch with anything relating to China, and their wide-eyed lack of preparedness is both eye-rollingly funny and sweet. Yes, they’re dumb for jumping on a plane to China after doing little to no research, and they certainly aren’t helping any generalizations about tourists. However, they’re so intensely clueless, you want them to succeed.
This hapless best friend duo is balanced by the trio of May (Alice Lee), an Asian-American woman with a strict agenda to meet her family, Ashley (Brittney Wilson), May’s reckless friend along for the ride, and Greg (Tim Key), an older businessman with some serious marital baggage. Each of these characters is out of place and confused in their own way, from May’s insistence that she understands “her people” though she constantly mispronounces words to the mess of half-truths that is Greg. However, there’s something really enjoyable about watching this rag-tag group struggle through Asia. They all love and hate each other in the way that being forced to travel somewhere completely new inspires. Add in Dylan’s deceptive and vaguely creepy stalking of his ex throughout the show’s eight episodes, and Gap Year watches a bit like another endearing British comedy, Channel 4 and Netflix’s Lovesick.
This isn’t the first time Hulu has explored the space of critically-acclaimed foreign comedies. The streaming service has had exclusive streaming right to the stellar Please Like Me for a while now, and it will be producing the show’s fourth and final season. Hulu also has access to a number of impressive overseas shows, from the Australian version of Wilfred to the U.K.’s The IT Crowd and New Zealand’s Short Poppies. That being said, Gap Year is an especially strong foreign acquisition, brilliant balancing between laugh-out-loud moments and relatable struggles.
If you want to take a holiday this summer but could do without the inevitable stress and crazy costs that comes with traveling, take a tour of Asia with Gap Year. You can enjoy all of the beautiful locations and laugh at its snarky characters’ misfortune from the comfort of your couch.
