'Spaced" -- the final frontier.
I know, terrible joke. Not as clever as anything in the marvelous British comedy series that has fans the likes of Quentin Tarantino ("Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill"), Kevin Smith ("Clerks," "Dogma"), Matt Stone ("South Park," "Team America: World Police"), Bill Hader ("Superbad" "SNL"), Patton Oswalt ("King of Queens," "Ratatouille") and Diablo Cody (Oscar-winning writer of "Juno"), all of whom do commentary on the new DVD set (BBC, $60).
"Spaced" revolves around a pair of twentysomething slackers who barely know each other, but pose as a "professional" couple to get an apartment.
Simon Pegg is the skateboarding would-be comic artist Tim, and Jessica Hynes (she was Stevenson then) is Daisy, a would-be writer with seemingly perpetual writer's block and on the dole.
They have a landlady, Marsha (Julia Deakin), who constantly has a cigarette in her hand (mysteriously always the same length), and downstairs lives tortured artist Brian (Mark Heap), who paints by whatever means necessary. Tim's best friend Mike, an overgrown GI Joe (Nick Frost), once stole a tank to invade Paris while in the military reserves, and Daisy's friend Twist (Katy Carmichael) is in fashion. She works at a dry cleaners.
If "Seinfeld" was about nothing, then "Spaced" was about doing nothing, only with cooler and funnier references. It helps to know post-"Star Wars" movies (that's 1977), although one quick subplot spoof -- and some of them go by so quickly -- involves the 1975 "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Pegg and Hynes did all the writing, and Edgar Wright, who has paired with Pegg for the hilarious spoof films "Shaun of the Dead" (zombies) and "Hot Fuzz" (buddy cop films), directed all the episodes.
Like "The Office," the series ran only two short seasons (1999-2000), 14 episodes in all, which allowed it to have its own arc instead of being open-ended like American sitcoms. Since then, it's been a cult favorite, with people watching episodes on Internet sites such as YouTube.
