In the mid-1990s, Eddie Izzard, in the years in which he was rapidly expanding his audience for his long-form stand-up shows, spent several years trying to get a sitcom into production at Britain’s Channel 4. The show was called Cows, and that title expresses everything you need to know about it. It was about a family of cows that lives in Britain like a normal family, except that they’re cows. Because of Izzard’s pedigree as a master of absurdist humor, it’s tempting to see Cows as some kind of an ingeniously brilliant and scathing anti-comedy casting a skeptical glance on Cool Britannia or something, but mostly it’s just really surprisingly stupid. Channel 4 was right to say no. The show went as far as shooting an episode or two, but it never made it to air.
The cast wore enormous cow heads that are quite unsightly and unfunny, considering that they came from Henson Corporation. The show isn’t, honestly, all that different from a lot of “wacky,” fish-out-of-water sitcoms in the manner of, say, Third Rock from the Sun, except that John Lithgow wasn’t obliged to do his emoting from inside what amounts to a massive Phillie Phanatic outfit. But even more fatal, Izzard and co-writer Nick Whitby appear to have thought that the risibility of cows would, in and of itself, carry them a long way.
The show was apparently in development for a long time—the pilot that was eventually shot is dated 1997, but already in 1995 Izzard was quoted as saying, “It’s now about a group of cows moving into a street, and how they get on with the people there who don’t know many cows. … It’ll either be great or it’ll be a pile of shit.” Well, Izzard seems to have gotten that one right, anyway. Easy as it is to take potshots at the show, who knows what the conception was at the outset and how that initial kernel morphed into this incomprehensible sitcom.
In this appearance at an Apple Store in 2009 with comedian Simon Amstell, Izzard fields an audience question about the failure of Cows. Izzard comments that his original conception was to do something similar to Planet of the Apes, but the bovine/simian differences ended up being a problem:
Izzard appears to have understood his limitations as a TV writer, commenting that he had a “problem with creativity without adrenalin” and “sometimes despaired of disciplining himself” in that field and that he missed “the lack of instant response.” According to Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office by Ben Thompson, Izzard’s agent Caroline Chignell later reflected on the experience: “Eddie was absolutely determined to prove that he had the skills and the application to be a writer. I think as it turned out, [the rejection of the series] was probably the best thing that could have happened.” Clearly, he needed to get an experience of that sort out of his system.
It’s funny to think that Izzard’s successful introduction to American audiences was happening right around this time. His standup show Definite Article went to New York City in 1996, and he taped his breakthrough show Dress to Kill in San Francisco in 1998; the latter special, which appeared on HBO in 1999, ended up winning Izzard two Emmys. Izzard has always had boundless energy and is known for biting off more than he can chew, as his running 43 marathons in 51 days in 2009 and recently declaring his intention to be elected mayor of London in 2020 surely attest.
It’s hard to make head or tails of the 49 minutes of the pilot, it doesn’t hang together as a single story, and the episode breaks aren’t clear. Among the first acts the cow family engages in is to light up a spliff roughly the size of a cricket bat. The cow family goes to a casino, they host a posh dinner party, one of them marries a human woman who is “our” surrogate for the “humor,” one of the cows delivers an address at a political convention in which, unaccustomed to speaking in front of an audience, he steals and mangles a bunch of Winston Churchill quotations. And none of it makes a lick of sense.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Eddie Izzard Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Will Eddie Izzard run for Mayor of London?
