Channel 4 Asks For More ‘Friday Night Dinner’ As Comedy Renewed For Season 6
Channel 4 has gone back for another helping of the critically-acclaimed and multi-award winning comedy, ‘Friday Night Dinner‘ as the broadcast renews the comedy for a 6th Season.
‘Friday Night Dinner’ follows the middle-class secular English/Jewish Goodman family as the consume Shabbat dinner each Friday night. Tamsin Greig, Paul Ritter, Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal star as the Goodman Family, with Mark Heap as Jim.
The series is written and produced by Robert Popper, who co-created and starred in BBC Two’s ‘Look Around You’ with Peter Serafinowicz, produced the Bafta-winning ‘Peep Show’, wrote on season 14 of ‘South Park’, and script-edited ‘The Inbetweeners’, ‘The IT Crowd’ and ‘Him & Her’. Robert also wrote the bestselling The Timewaster Letters books under his pseudonym, Robin Cooper. Recently, he co-wrote several episodes of Channel 4’s ‘Stath Lets Flats’, with Jamie Demetriou.
“I’m really looking forward to exploring new avenues with series 6. Inspector de Vries (Paul Ritter) will still be working on the Rynsburger case, but this time he’s joined by new partner-in-crime, Mees Janssen (Tom Rosenthal), fresh out of Rotterdam Police Academy,” commented Popper. “Eva de Bruin (Tamsin Greig) is now trying to regain control of her pharmaceutical company, after an aggressive takeover-bid by the always-cunning Sem Teuling (Simon Bird). But can ‘Vos’ (Mark Heap) and his faithful dog, ‘de Welson’ save the day?”
The comedy series is one of Channel 4’s longest running sitcoms. Series 5 is the second highest rating series for the show so far, beaten only by Series 1. It also attracted the biggest audience share across all series. The series averaged 1.9m / 11.4% per episode – up +19% on slot average and up +27% for share – outperforming the series 4.
“We’re delighted that audiences love Friday Night Dinner as much as we do at Channel 4, and are thrilled that it will be returning,” adds Fiona McDermott, Head of Comedy at Channel 4. “It’s always brilliant when audiences for a show grow over time and we’re thrilled that more and more people are falling in love with the Goodmans. We are so pleased to be making a new series with Robert and Big Talk.”
Launching in 2011 the series went on to win Best Situation Comedy at the 2012 Rose D’Or Festival and was nominated at Best Situation Comedy and Best Female Performance in a Comedy for Tamsin Greig at the 2012 BAFTA TV Awards. Other nominations include Best New Comedy Programme, Best Sitcom, Best Comedy Actress for Tamsin Greig and Best Comedy Breakthrough Artist for Tom Rosenthal at the British Comedy Awards 2011. Best Situation Comedy at the National Television Awards 2011, and gained a Best Comedy writer nod for Robert Popper at The Royal Television Society Award 2012. The recent series won the British Comedy Guide award for Best returning TV Sitcom.
The new six-part series of ‘Friday Night Dinner‘ will shoot late 2019 and premiere in 2020 on Channel 4. You can catch up on seasons 1 to 5 on All4 right now.
