Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Full Monty’ On FX/Hulu, An Unfocused Sequel Series To The 1997 Film (2024)

You can never accuse Disney of leaving an IP-exploiting opportunity on the table. And it’s not just limited to remaking their animated movies in to weird live-action versions; they seem willing to plunder the back catalog they got when they bought 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight, too. Case in point: The 1997 film The Full Monty, where six doughy laid-off steelworkers from Sheffield take it all off for a good cause. Twenty-six years later, the gang are back, older and somewhat wiser, for an eight-episode series. Even though they likely won’t strip, will it still be fun to have them around?

THE FULL MONTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from the 1997 film The Big Monty, set to the song “You Sexy Thing.” We see the local pub the guys frequented. Then we flash to 2023; the pub is closed and the houses around it have gone to seed.

The Gist: Sheffield in 2023 is struggling just as much as it did in 1997, just in a different way, given Brexit and some of the other realities of life that are different now than they were 26 years ago. The gang of steelworkers who displayed “the full monty” to help a friend out back then all are still around. Gaz (Robert Carlyle) is a hospital orderly; Dave (Mark Addy) is a custodian/security guard at the school where his wife Jean (Lesley Sharp) is the principal. Gerald (Tom Wilkinson), Horse (Paul Barber) and Guy (Hugo Spear) hang out with Dave and Gaz at The Big Baps, a coffee shop owned by Lomper (Steve Huison) and his husband Dennis (Paul Clayton).

Destiny Sheffield (Talitha Wing), Gaz’s daughter, comes right up to the gate of school, and looks Dave in the eye before turning around and ditching. She even recruits her buddy Cal (Dominic Sharkey) to ditch and go to the mall instead of going to his double math and double physics classes. On the way to the mall, Gaz sees Des while he’s carrying a mattress he pulled from a Dumpster. She more or less blows him off, since he’s barely been in her life for many years.

They get to the mall, where Des nicks some candy from an open bin. Then she spots a luxury car in the parking lot with an open door and the keys in the ignition. Over Cal’s objections, they get in and take off. Little did they know that there’s a dog in the back seat. She’s a very obedient dog, and instead of dumping it in an alley they end up taking it with them. Little do they know that she’s the winner of Britain’s Got Talent, and worth over a million pounds.

One problem: She and Cal posted a selfie with the dog in it. So they go to their friend Tabani (Natalie Davies) to try to get it off Instagram; instead, she posts a ransom meme for the dog that she sets to be sent to hundreds of accounts at once.

When she does realize what she has, she drops the dog with her father to anonymously give it back. But Gaz drops it with Dave, who brings it to lunch at The Big Baps (a name that’s patently offensive to everyone in the area). When Gaz gets it back and tries to give the dog back to her owner, the dog doesn’t want it; in fact, he’ll pay Gaz to kill the pooch.

Des, after bonding a bit with Gaz, decides that the boyfriend of her mother Yaz (Tupele Dorgu) tries her last nerve, and she wants to move in with her father. She walks in on him holding a gun at the dog.

Meanwhile, Horse deals with being old, not being able to work self-check registers, and getting an eviction notice. Jean is chuffed that the school is overbudget and under-maintained, and asks Dave if he was proud of himself instead of just being proud of her. Gaz’s son Nathan (Wim Snape) is now a cop, and he knows his little sister Des had something to do with the dog’s disappearance. And David finds a 12-year-old kid named Dean (Aiden Cook) — nickname “Twiglet” — stealing food from the kitchen. Instead of turning him into Jean, though, he decides to have him help clean up the gym.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Obviously, the series brings back the entire cast from the original 1997 film, so there’s that. But there are also elements of the rambling series that reminds us of Sex Education and Derry Girls.

Our Take: After the first episode of The Full Monty, we were trying to figure out where the story of the series is, and the only thing we could come up with was, “Here are the six working-class guys who stripped naked in their 30s and 40s now dealing with being in their 50s and 60s.”

Sure, the world is a lot different, and England is a lot different, which drives some of what writers Simon Beaufoy and Alice Nutter are bringing to the series. And being with this group of friends again all these years later still gives the warm feeling the original movie did. But the original movie was focused on a particular event — these friends exposing themselves in front of an audience of their wives, girlfriends, and rabid townswomen that they mostly know — and the series, well, isn’t.

As the description of the first episode we gave above indicates, almost everyone has their own issues to deal with, whether it’s family-related stuff like Gaz has, or the lack of family, like Dave is facing. Or it could just be the shifting cultural sands beneath their feet; it’s not like these guys were hooked into the late ’90s zeitgeist, so 2023 must feel even more mysterious to them.

What we’re wondering is if this quarter century of goodwill on the part of the movie’s fans is enough to carry the show through eight 50-minute episodes. Addy, Carlyle, Wilkinson, et al all play their roles as if they never stopped playing them, and the addition of “next generation” characters like Wing as Destiny brings some new blood into the mix.

This indeed may be the case where just spending time with old friends and a few new ones is enough. But we just have a feeling that we’re going to be spending this season waiting for something big to happen and coming away disappointed.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: When Des sees Gaz aiming his gun at the dog, she says, “What ya doing?” He puts the gun down, says, “Nothing! Nothing!” and pets the dog.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Miles Jupp as Darren, who got dismissed from his job for calling a woman “love,” which is a “Hashtag bloody me too” violation, according to Dennis.

Most Pilot-y Line: Just like when we saw the DVD and/or VHS of the film around 1998, we had to turn on the subtitles to understand everyone’s jargon-heavy Sheffield accents.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only because all of the characters from The Full Monty that you loved in the ’90s are back and as quirky as ever in the new series. But, just like the dog that got kidnapped in the first episode, the show is a bit shaggy and aimless, which may make your goodwill for these characters wane after a few episodes.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.