idiot abroad series — what people are actually searching
people search idiot abroad without the article. they are in a hurry. an article is, after all, a small commitment, and karl pilkington is the kind of figure you arrive at out of breath, missing a sock, having lost the previous tab. i respect that arrival method. i use it daily.
2:18 on a tuesday. the shared inbox has 412 unread items. i opened one, read three words, marked it unread, and called that triage. the boss is on three doing a vendor walkthrough, and i am here, on two, doing a word.
today’s focus is the word “series”. specifically the word in the phrase idiot abroad series. it is a word people type when they cannot remember if they are looking for a show, a season, a special, or a thing that happened once on a plane. the word is doing more work than the word can carry. stefan, my one acquaintance with an actual vineyard, would say wine words have the same problem — vintage versus year versus bottle versus pour — and stefan, here, has a point.
idiot abroad series: “series” is the british word for what americans call a “season”. in the case of karl pilkington’s an idiot abroad pillar i wrote earlier, three series ran from 2010 to 2012, eight episodes each, with one special. so “an idiot abroad series”, depending on which side of the atlantic you woke up on, can mean the entire show or just one batch of eight. both are correct. only one is helpful.
SERIES. SEASON. SHOW. PICK ONE. WE’RE ADULTS.
upfront: i am not paid to think about television vocabulary. i am paid to maintain a tracker nobody opens, and i have not maintained it today. so if i am wrong about what a series is, i am wrong on the company’s clock.
the british call it series. the americans call it season. nobody calls it correct.
here is the problem with the word as the british use it. they call eight episodes “a series”. they also call the whole show, three of those, “a series”. same word, doing two jobs. fine in the supermarket, never fine in language.
americans, who are at least consistent, call eight episodes “a season” and the whole thing “a show”. neat. tidy. the british, who invented this language, looked at that system and said no, we’ll use the same word twice and let context handle it. context cannot handle this.
so when somebody types idiot abroad series into a search bar, they could mean the whole show, one of the three, the special, or all four. the search bar does not ask for clarification. it hands you a page and walks away.
the karl pilkington case, restated
karl pilkington was sent abroad three times by ricky gervais, who paid him for the privilege of being made uncomfortable — a transaction so honest i salute it from this desk. each batch of eight episodes is a series. the BBC says it. the imdb page says it, in a listing format that makes every show look like a phone bill.
now, here is what the word does not handle. there are also specials. “the bucket list”. “the short way round”. one is sometimes counted as a series, one is sometimes counted as a thing-attached-to-a-series. people argue about this on the kind of forum that has been online since 2011 and uses a font from 2003.
the case study, narrowly: pilkington’s three runs are series 1, 2, and 3. an american streamer rebrands them season 1, 2, and 3. same eight episodes, two words on the cover. nothing inside the box changed. but if you search one phrase you get one set of results, and the other phrase a different set. the word matters more than the show.
a man in the comment section of an old daily mail piece — and i should say, i was not there for the article, i was there because a tab opened on its own and i felt obligated to investigate — said the word “series” had been “ruined by the streaming era”. he said it like he had been waiting to say it for nine years.
i would like to defend the word, gently, in his absence. the word is not ruined. the word is just doing too much. it is the third yoga mat of language. you bought it once, you used it once, now it lives under everything and you can’t be sure what it actually was for. that is not the word’s fault. we asked the word to mean two things. it agreed. it did its best.
respect the word. blame the streamer.
HT21, because pilkington proves it
i hold a position, and i hold it from the desk: beach vacations are punishment with sand. you pay money to be hot, sticky, and partially eaten. you come back tireder than you left. the entire enterprise is a hostage situation with a swim-up bar.
pilkington, in his three series, was sent to beaches. to wonders. to a hut. and he had, at every location, the same face — a man who would prefer to be at home, on a sofa, with a cup of tea, watching someone else be at the wonder. across an idiot abroad series, three times, eight episodes each, the man who was paid to enjoy travel did not enjoy travel. that is data. that is, frankly, peer review.
examples of “series” working overtime
the word “series” is also what the british use for cricket — a “test series”, five matches of five days each, math i have looked at and decided cannot be real. it is also a word for a financial product nobody at the bar fully understands. it is also the word for a run of small disasters in a person’s life, as in “a series of poor decisions”, which is the genre i live in.
for the show itself the deeper, philosophical version lives at the an idiot abroad anchor post. specific destinations live in their own posts — the china one covers what they actually filmed there, the brazil one covers what they did not.
which “series” you actually want, in three sentences
if you typed idiot abroad series hoping to find one specific batch — say series 2, the one through europe and asia — you want the streaming search, not the wikipedia tab. if you typed it hoping to find the whole thing, you want a single result and the rest of your afternoon. and if you typed it hoping to find karl pilkington personally, i regret to inform you that he is unreachable, possibly on a sofa, possibly with tea.
none of the three options requires you to learn the british/american distinction. all three reward you for ignoring the word and clicking the picture of the round head.
verdict from the desk, second floor
tracker still untouched. inbox now at 414. one of those is from the boss but the subject line is just “?” and i have decided to interpret that punctuation as rhetorical until somebody clarifies.
“series” means eight episodes if you’re british, twenty-four if you’re lazy with the word, and a haircut on a man with a thermos if you’re talking pilkington. all three are right. one is what you searched for. i can’t tell you which.
what i can tell you is that the word is not the problem. the problem is that pilkington made the same expression in twenty-four different countries and we, as a culture, are still arguing about how to label that. the label is “series”. sometimes “season”. sometimes whether the thing is even still on, two thousand and twenty-two and beyond, which i have addressed elsewhere with results that surprised nobody.
the boss is now back at his desk. i can see the top of his head from here. it is, briefly, doing the pilkington thing — same head, different weather. i am going to close this tab, open the tracker, and look at it long enough to count as having considered it. that is one episode. eight more and i’ll have a series.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
written between an unopened email and a slack message i have decided to interpret loosely
P.S. dave texted last night asking if i wanted to “watch a series with him”. he did not specify which series. i said yes anyway. he meant the gaslighting one with the british guy. i was, briefly, hoping for pilkington. it was not pilkington. dave does not know what he has done.
