Rowan Atkinson

Blackadder is Atkinson’s insult as period architecture: Elizabethan, Regency, then the trenches, Hugh Laurie’s upper-class vacancy, Baldrick’s plans. Start anywhere; the last Goes Forth hour still takes the joke away. Peak 1980s UK comedy export. Edmund is the snark that knows the empire is a setup. Atkinson plays intelligence as a survival tactic that never quite survives.

Start the Blackadder stack (BBC One, 1983–1989) when you want Edmund Blackadder without a clip-farm tour. File s01e01 as ignition: The Foretelling is the medieval first rung: Atkinson's historical snark, Robinson's dogsbody already the secret engine, cunning plans not yet trench-true. s03e01 is later weather: Dish and Dishonesty opens the Regency rung: upper-class vacancy loading, the export already peak 1980s UK comedy. Atkinson is already the reason the title has a pulse.

Mr. Bean parked a teddy bear in a talky decade and won: parking, church, a holiday turkey, silent-film engineering, cruel in a gentle way. A face that does not need subtitles. On TV Flash Atkinson is two-decade authorship — the sneer and the mute, the trench and the Mini. Watch Blackadder for the floor dropping. Watch Bean for the raise of an eyebrow that became a country.

1990–1995 on ITV: Mr. Bean as the room, Mr. Bean as Atkinson's job, 1990s as the tag. s01e01 is the door — Mr. Bean: almost no dialogue, a teddy bear, parking as physical comedy that travels without a punchline paragraph. s01e03 keeps the climate: The Curse of Mr. Bean: church and public space as silent-film sets, cruelty still gentle, the face still the plot. The catalog wants temperature. Cue the hour. Skip the merch still.