Martin Freeman of BBC America's The Robinsons
Office Star Freeman back on BBC
BBC America will air the
Ed (Martin Freeman, The Office, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) lives a life of quiet desperation. He’s 32 and recently divorced from a disastrous marriage which ended with his wife telling him he was useless in bed. His job in insurance is less than rewarding and he’s living in a dilapidated apartment owned by his aunt. What’s gone wrong in his life? How difficult can it be to find a decent job, a home, a girlfriend and some sort of future?
Ed’s search for himself takes him to many places but nowhere more intriguing than his very own family. Perfectionist big sister, Vicky (Abigail Cruttenden, Charlotte Gray), is an interior decorator in constant search of a boyfriend who can meet her impossibly high standards she dumps one guy because he doesn’t like Fawlty Towers (he also sniffs too much) and is compelled to break up with an older man because she's paranoid she’ll develop a father fixation. His older brother George (Hugh Bonneville, Iris, Notting Hill) is a workplace time and motion specialist who can’t leave his quest for corporate efficiency in the office. When he realizes his 5-year-old son Albert is not socializing at school, he puts together a seminar on socialization compete with role-play, slides and lecture and comes up with an equally rational - if unromantic - plan to schedule attempts to enlarge his family between business trips.
Ed’s dad, Hector (Richard Johnson, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), is a world-weary, disappointed man married to, and constantly arguing with, Pam (Anna Massey, The Importance of Being Earnest), his feisty but equally jaded wife. Ed finds them excruciatingly embarrassing, especially when they indulge in their frank discussions of subjects that he would rather avoid, such as sex, death and disease.
Despite being the sanest member of this neurotic bunch, Ed is always in the shadow of his more successful siblings. Blind to their own issues, they’re obsessively aware of Ed’s problems even though their interference only hampers his attempts to bounce-back from his setbacks.
