“Drop the Dead Donkey,” available on the Roku Channel and Pluto, is a six-season British sitcom that debuted in 1990. It’s set at GlobeLink, a news station, and the show’s scripts were completed just before broadcast in order to include topical news references. Each episode begins with a mini-recap of the week’s headlines — a real bonanza for the Wikipedia-while-you-watch crowd. Some news items might be unfamiliar to most American viewers, but plenty are not just recognizable but also surprisingly, sometimes dispiritingly, resonant.
“Donkey” kicks off with GlobeLink’s acquisition by the offscreen Sir Roysten Merchant, whose tabloid tastes make everyone in the newsroom bristle. Especially when he insists on installing a new anchor: Sally (Victoria Wicks), whom the others perceive as an unqualified ditz.
Not that the rest of them have a leg to stand on. The senior anchor, Henry (David Swift), is awfully stuck in his ways, and Damien (Stephen Tompkinson), the popular features reporter, constantly juices his stories with unethical practices — an amped-up version of William Hurt’s character in “Broadcast News.” George, the top editor (Jeff Rawle), is trying to hang on to his newsroom authority, but mostly he just caves to the demands of Gus (Robert Duncan), a vapid stuffed shirt and Roysten attaché who loves corporate nonsense jargon. Alex (Haydn Gwynne) is the cynical voice of reason, though often more cynical than reasonable.
“Donkey,” created by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins, fits alongside other newsroom shows: “Murphy Brown,” especially; “NewsRadio” a bit; and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” here and there. “Donkey” is a little slower, more misanthropic than those, but it’s still a sitcom sitcom. Its 65 episodes have a linear story, but the show is mostly episodic, and its brainy zingers and physical comedy don’t require much buy in; you can watch any episode or season and absolutely get the gist.
Part of the appeal of “Donkey” is how ramshackle everything seems compared with the super-HD-and-Chiclet-veneers of contemporary sitcoms. The laugh track here is jarring, the costumes are frumpy; sometimes you can see the performers genuinely sweating. It creates the frisson of getting close enough to a painting to see the brush strokes, that little gasp of “Oh! The human hand!”
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