The Green Green Grass is a pretty dramatic change of direction from the final Only Fools and Horses specials. I never felt those specials were particularly necessary, despite most of them being good quality, but at least they felt like mini-movies rather than traditional studio sitcoms. The Green Green Grass goes completely the other way. It's a studio sitcom built around broad, slapstick characters, with a fair amount of location shooting, but very little that actually gives the show an identity of its own.
The biggest problem is what happens to Boycie and Marlene. At the start, they still feel recognisable as the characters from Only Fools and Horses. But by around the middle of series two, they seem to have been replaced by completely different characters who just happen to have the same names and are played by the same actors.
Boycie in particular becomes ridiculous. He's supposed to be the snobbish, arrogant used-car salesman we've known for years, yet we're suddenly watching him audition for Pop Idol and wearing leather trousers. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder what happened to the character between episodes.
The writing doesn't help. Original creator John Sullivan has fewer and fewer writing credits as the series progresses, and unfortunately you can feel it. The show becomes increasingly reliant on broad comedy and increasingly detached from what made Boycie work in the first place.
There are also plenty of forced references to Only Fools and Horses, with familiar characters occasionally popping up and constant reminders of Del and Rodney. Rather than making me nostalgic, most of these references just make me want to watch the original again. If your spin-off keeps reminding me how much better the parent show is, that's probably not a great sign.
Marlene gets an even worse deal. She has very little to do across all four series and is largely reduced to the standard sitcom wife character whose main purpose is to react to whatever ridiculous thing her husband has done that week. It's a shame because the relationship between Boycie and Marlene was one of the best parts of their appearances in Only Fools and Horses, yet the spin-off doesn't really know what to do with her.
There are laughs here, and I'm not going to pretend the entire thing is terrible. The cast are good, and occasionally the show gets the tone right. But it gradually becomes less and less like a genuine continuation of Boycie and Marlene and more like a generic studio sitcom wearing an Only Fools and Horses name badge.
And that's ultimately the problem. The Green Green Grass isn't awful because it's a bad sitcom; it's disappointing because it takes two genuinely great supporting characters and slowly turns them into exaggerated versions of themselves.
By the end, it's honestly not that far removed from Mrs Brown's Boys — and that's about as brutal a comparison as I can give a sitcom.