Why saying goodbye to Gavin & Stacey is so bittersweet

The last time Gavin & Stacey got the gang back together, for a Christmas special in 2019 after the show had been off the air for nine years, half of Britain's viewership (about 12 million people) tuned in to watch it. To say that doesn’t happen on live TV in the U.K. outside of a particularly big-deal, international football match might sound hyperbolic. But to be clear: That does not happen.  

So in that sense, one more episode of the James Corden and Ruth Jones-penned sitcom  feels predestined. (The engagement, dubbed Gavin & Stacey: The Finale, will be available on BBC iPlayer and BBC One on Christmas night in the U.K. [and after that will stream, along with a making-of documentary, on Britbox in the States as of an as-yet-announced date].) There’s clearly an audience clamoring for more of the show and its very Christmastime-appropriate (and, in the case of the upcoming sendoff, Christmastime-set) warm vibes. And, besides, that surprise holiday one-off from five years back ended on quite the cliffhanger. (At this point, if you haven’t seen Gavin & Stacey, you should check it out on Peacock or Britbox and probably stop reading this.) But knowing this is the end is kind of bittersweet: It more than makes sense that it’s going away—in fact, it’s kind of incredible that fans can look forward to a new hour of the sweet, occasionally biting comedy some 17 after it started—but that doesn’t make it sting any less.  

I first heard about Gavin & Stacey from Steve Coogan. This was in 2008, and at that point in my life—hell, at this point in my life—I took anything he said as comedic gospel and basically unimpeachable, what with Alan Partridge and 24 Hour Party People and Saxondale and all the rest of it. The actor-writer’s production company, Baby Cow, was behind the show, and there were definite Coogan ingredients in the mix here: Jones, who also co-leads as Nessa, the best friend of Stacey (Joanna Page), played Coogan’s partner in Saxondale, a very funny shows about a fuck-the-system ex-roadie who drives a pest-control van in the suburbs; and Rob Brydon (Gavin & Stacey’s unequivocal MVP) sparred regularly with him in Michael Winterbottom’s Party People and A Cock And Bull Story (and would go on to do so, wonderfully, in the director’s 10-year project The Trip). 

But Gavin & Stacey isn’t really like any of the titles mentioned above: For one, it’s essentially a classic, sunny rom-com, following the titular couple (Stacey is from a working-class background in Barry, Wales; and Mathew Horne’s Gavin hails from a more upper-crust one in Essex, England) as they quickly fall in love and start a life together. (Gavin’s best friend, Smithy, is played by, yes, co-writer Corden.) For another, you wouldn’t mistake any of these characters, save perhaps Nessa (who’s slept with everyone from Dodi Fayed and Russell Brand to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and “two of Gladys Knight’s Pips”), as all that cool or even the kind of people who like to think of themselves as such (unlike, say, the out-of-time Tommy Saxondale). (You get the sense that The Libertines and The Fratellis, both of which provide needle drops on the show, are about as “indie” as these twentysomethings get, and Gavin and Smithy’s friend group is incredibly laddy.) What’s more, the show can stray into cheesy territory as it stages proposals and big wedding speeches and other tropes that come with the genre (although, more often than not, these moments—like that aforementioned Christmas-special cliffhanger—emotionally land).   

Although it might be pretty devoid of cynicism, the series does have bite. Take this speech, from Bryn (Brydon), Stacey’s closeted, very sweet, ever-impressed-by-technology uncle, as she prepares to meet Gavin for the first time in the pilot: 

“Stace, tomorrow morning, you are traveling to London, England to meet a boy you’ve never met before. I offered to come with you. You said no. I offered to drive you and wait in the car. You said no. Now, you’ve met meet halfway on the rape alarm. At least have the decency to let me give you a demonstration. Because, I'll tell you this for nothing: If you come back Sunday raped, and I showed you how to use it, I’ll rest easy in my bed. You come back Sunday raped, the fault will lie solely at you door. So please, attack me.”  (That this pilot ends with the main pair declaring their love and making out to the sound of that rape alarm is just perfect.) 

And yet, any jokes with edge (references to STDs, pedophilia, crack, and Smithy’s 17-year-old girlfriend all pop up in the pilot) are always couched in the show’s sweetness, which makes Gavin & Stacey, specifically its first season, a prime post-shitty-day comfort watch. It’s the type of show where you can see one of its running jokes coming from a mile away (there are so many of them, including a fishing trip in which Bryn and his then-child-aged nephew Jason [Robert Wilfort] had to resort to something that may or may not have looked sexual in order to keep warm, Pam’s [an entertainingly peppy Alison Steadman] hatred of “that hussy” Lady Di, and Nessa’s “Oh!”s) yet find solace in the predictable rhythms of it.

Which is all to say that even if the upcoming finale has a few stumbles (there were some in the last special, namely Smithy’s almost cartoonishly wrong-for-him girlfriend), it will nevertheless be a real joy to catch up with this crew one last time and nearly two decades after we first met them, laughing at the familiar beats, basking in the nostalgia, and even, sure, getting swept up when Corden and Jones invariably deliver a potent dose of the feels.