‘The Full Monty’ series revival looks all dressed up with no place to go

Review by Brian Lowry, CNN

(CNN) — “The Fully Monty” quickly reveals itself to be one of those revivals that’s all dressed up with no place to go, squandering enthusiasm for this transformation of the genial 1997 box-office hit into an eight-episode series. Most of the gang returns, but it’s a reunion largely in search of a concept, which taps into the economic desperation that motivated their original strip routine without the lightness to offset that.

The British comedy obviously came at a very different time, one where an import breaking through into the US market to such commercial success was more unusual. Today, the hunger for streaming content has produced a flood of material from across the globe, though often in series form, the chosen path here.

Developing by original screenwriter Simon Beaufoy with Alice Nutter, this “Full Monty” peaks early, it turns out, by noting that it’s 26 years and “seven prime ministers later” since the movie. The narrative finds the old characters generally worse for wear, facing various financial and personal hardships in Sheffield, which hasn’t rebounded from the industrial loss and unemployment that brought them together initially.

Gaz (Robert Carlyle) is still a bit of a dreamer, only now with a teenage daughter (Talitha Wing) to consider, while Dave (Mark Addy) works at the local school along with his wife Jean (Lesley Sharp), with trouble having crept into their relationship. Lomper (Steve Huison) is married (Paul Clayton plays his husband), though Guy (Hugo Speer) is still around, briefly, with Speer having been dismissed from the show over allegations of questionable behavior.

Rounding out the group are Horse (Paul Barber), who has hit hard times, while Tom Wilkinson appears only fleetingly as Gerald.

Alas, the rush of seeing those more-wrinkled brows reassembled soon fades, as “The Full Monty” bogs down in various levels of minutia, perhaps best exemplified by an episode almost wholly devoted to a prize pigeon, after an earlier subplot about a posh dog. Carlyle makes for the best company, with Gaz having never really outgrown his status as a genial screwup and perpetual Peter Pan, but there’s only so much even he can do under the circumstances.

While the economic travails of a working-class town possess a certain emotional and indeed cultural resonance that again crosses borders, the series lacks the sense that it’s building toward anything, feeling drearily episodic in a way that mirrors its muted-grey environs.

The streaming series has become a popular vehicle for capitalizing upon the name recognition of old movies (see recent updates of “Grease” and “Fatal Attraction” as recent examples), no doubt inspired in part by Netflix’s “Cobra Kai,” which lent itself more readily to that more expansive format.

Pursuing a similar route with “The Full Monty” – a synergistic exercise, incidentally, coming from one of Disney’s production units and premiering via Hulu – might have sounded good in theory. Yet stripped down to its pretty-bare merits as a viewing proposition, it doesn’t offer much incentive to leave your set on.

“The Full Monty” premieres June 14 on Hulu.

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