‘The Wrong Mans,’ just the right touch

Can you parody a genre if the genre has already parodied itself?

Hulu’s six-episode series “The Wrong Mans” is a parody of the “wrong man” genre of thrillers, in which an innocent person is accused of a crime and has to evade the authorities while trying to exonerate himself or catch the real criminals. Perhaps because mistaken identity is an important element in farce, these movies often have an undercurrent of comedy, especially when directed by Alfred Hitchcock. By the time Hitchcock made “North by Northwest,” the undercurrent had became the main current.

The seriocomic quality of these thrillers actually allows the creators of “The Wrong Mans” to have it both ways. The series’ absurdly complex plot and genre clichés are clearly tongue-in-cheek, but we still find ourselves rooting for the heroes and getting caught up in the suspense. Light and witty, the series is the perfect time filler, especially now that both cable and broadcast channels are giving us nothing but reruns during the holidays.

A co-production of Hulu and the BBC, “The Wrong Mans” was written by and stars the British actors Mathew Baynton and James Corden. Baynton is Sam, “a town-planning and noise-guidance advisor for the Berkshire County Council” who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend, Lizzie (Sarah Solemani), who is also his boss.

Walking to work one morning, Sam is nearly run over by a car that then crashes. He hears a mobile phone ringing nearby. The voice on the other end tells him, “If you’re not here by five o’clock, we will kill your wife.”

Sam confides in Phil (Corden), a mailroom guy who is fond of action-movie clichés. Phil says that rather than turn the phone in and alert the police, they should rescue the woman. When Sam says, “This isn’t a game,” Phil replies, “Then why have I got my game face on?”

After a series of complications, during which Sam nearly has a leg surgically amputated, Sam and Phil decide they have to meet the kidnapper. As Phil predicted, his hostage is a beautiful woman, Scarlett (Emilia Fox).

It would spoil the surprises to explain how the plot thickens, but it soon becomes impenetrable. Since the comedy has predisposed us to take everything with a grain of salt, the leaps in logic are easy to swallow.

Throughout, the show scores easy but real laughs with the contrast between Phil and Sam’s sad-sack lives and the increasingly dangerous threats they confront. While Phil, who is 31 and still lives with his mother (Dawn French), is trying to download a piece of evidence onto his computer, his mother walks in and assumes he is watching porn.

“What did I tell you about watching mucky ladies?” she asks him.

“They’re not happy,” he replies.

“No, they are not happy,” she says.

The actors are refreshingly low-key. The humor usually sneaks up on us rather than hits us on the head.

Like many British comedies, the show nails the drabness of midlevel white-collar work. Despite himself, Sam comes to appreciate his possibly fatal adventures, if only as a change of pace.

Over the week in which the story takes place, Lizzie begins to notice Sam’s transformation. Like the thriller elements of the plot, the romance works on its own terms despite all the silliness.

We even start to root for Sam and Phil to become friends.

“The Wrong Mans” pulls off the neat trick of satirizing thriller clichés while using those same clichés to jerk us around. Like many of the best parodies, it has a grudging respect for its target.