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Ian McKellen Bitchy Sitcom "Vicious" Getting Downton Abbey Treatment At PBS

Ian McKellen is having another career renaissance: He's the toast of Broadway, has pretty much owned Instagram and is readying for another X-blockbuster with Days of Future Past. But that's not nearly enough! With the runaway success of UK imports Downton Abbey and Sherlock, PBS has picked up McKellen's 2013 Britcom, Vicious, which aired across the pond last spring.

In the six-episode serie, McKellen and fellow out actor Derek Jacobi play  Freddie and Stuart, an older homosexual couple that has stayed together for 50 years despite a dysfunctional love-hate relationship. (Ironically, Jacobi admitted that when both men were students at Cambridge he carried a torchfor McKellen "that was undeclared and unrequited.")

Reviews were mixed when the show debuted, with some critics being as bitchy as McKellan and Jacobi's characters. “The basic schtick in Vicious is high-camp bitchiness, a form that reached an apogee in the American sitcom Will & Grace," wrote The Independent. "This is a sadly depleted version, though, and it’s delivered by McKellen and Jacobi as if they’re playing in Wembley Stadium and only the upper tiers are occupied, with a heavily semaphored effeminacy that seems to belong to an entirely different era.”

Can someone translate that for us?

According to Deadline Vicious will start airing in the U.S. on July 6. A second season has already been ordered in the UK, so presumably PBS will snatch that up to.

Check out the opening credits to Vicious below

Vicious from Jump Design on Vimeo.

h.t.: Deadline

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