James Corden to tries to break America with online comedy The Wrong Mans

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

James Corden at the Brits 2012 (Getty Images)

He has already wowed Broadway and sold Gavin and Stacey to Fox. Now James Corden is bidding to become a star of the American small screen too.

The actor/writer’s new BBC comedy thriller, The Wrong Mans, co-starring Mathew Baynton, will stream online in America on Hulu. In a glossy trailer that looks more like a Hollywood blockbuster than a BBC sitcom, Corden pokes fun at the link-up, storming out when he discovers that his show will air online, rather than on network or cable TV in the US. “The internet? Ah, this is a joke,” he fumes.  

In fact, The Wrong Mans follows some illustrious comedies in going online: the new Arrested Development is now streaming on Netflix and Jerry Seinfeld is shooting a second, 24-part series of his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee for Crackle.

The Wrong Mans, billed as a British Coen Brothers adventure, stars Corden and Baynton as a pair of office workers who are caught up in a criminal conspiracy when they answer a phone at the scene of an accident.

Hulu’s dollars funded the show’s more extravagant stunts, according to Baynton. “That’s why the BBC hooked us up with Hulu and made it a co-production”, he told RadioTimes.com “We managed to make the show we wrote without any compromise, which is a rare thing to be able to say. It’s visually ambitious and we’re trying to do something that is thrilling as well as funny”. It won’t do Corden’s US profile any harm, either.

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