You’ll chwerthin. You’ll crio. You’ll crynu.
So declares a trailer for Welsh Wednesdays, the six-hour block of Welsh television programming that the actor and recent Cambrophile Ryan Reynolds has brought to his new US entertainment channel Maximum Effort. In keeping with Reynolds’s goofy sensibility, most of Maximum Effort’s shows are nostalgic American TV comedies. But the hump-day special showcase promises a weekly infusion of exotic entertainment unlike anything on the usual suspect streaming platforms.
Reynolds clearly gets a kick out of Welsh culture. Last year he and his fellow actor Rob McElhenney, of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame, released a feelgood docuseries about their ongoing attempt to rehab a failing football club in Wales, Welcome to Wrexham. The show is the Deadpool star’s love letter to a land a world far away from his primary base of Los Angeles. To go by Welsh Wednesdays, the romance with a country whose population rivals that of Connecticut is only heating up.
The Maximum Effort channel, shown on the sports-geared streaming service Fubo, is an offshoot of Reynolds’s production and investment company. Recent projects include Mint Mobile, Aviation Gin and Betty Buzz, a non-alcoholic cocktail company created by Reynolds’s wife, the Gossip Girl star Blake Lively.
Most of the time, the network airs comedies such as Alf, Mad TV and The Office (the original, British version), as well as Bedtime Stories with Ryan, in which the leading man dons pajamas and reads soporific tales to a herd of sheep puppets. A representative from the network declined to share viewership numbers for either the network or its Welsh programming initiative.
The latter, presented in conjunction with the Welsh public television channel S4C, showcases a curiously winsome crop. The Welsh shows on rotation include Pen Petrol, a documentary series about young smile-averse car obsessives in north Wales; Red Wall, a football-crazy talkshow with a distinctly 90s vibe; and Bang, a melodramatic family crime drama set in a steel town. There’s also Y Fets, a show about a veterinary practice in the seaside town of Aberystwyth. And of course there is Wrexham propaganda, by way of Wrecsam Clwb Ni (Wrexham Our Club), a surprisingly polished behind-the-scenes documentary with a focus on female subjects. Pure as his love for all things Welsh might be, Reynolds’s latest passion project also happens to be a cunning lead-up to season 2 of Welcome to Wrexham, which will air later this year. (The Welsh team are currently touring through the US this summer.)
Despite the “Don’t worry, there will be subtitles!” headline that crowned a recent Guardian article on the Canadian actor’s curatorial project, English language translation is only intermittently on offer. Last week’s attempt to tune in was a bust and it was apparent that non-Welsh speakers (including the 82% of the Welsh population who don’t speak Welsh fluently) will have to find other ways to roll with the programming.
Anyone who isn’t fluent in Cymraeg has little choice but to submit to the hypnotic side of the experience. Amid the unfamiliar sounds – soft yet guttural – an English phrase occasionally slips from the mouths of the personalities. Dotting the utterances of Pen Patrol’s bearded gear heads (I fear the day the cast members of Sons of Anarchy spring for DNA tests) are recognizable yet mysterious expressions such as “boy racers” or “antisocial driving”.
Wednesday’s programming block was in better shape, subtitles-wise. There are horns aplenty on Red Wall, a chaotic pep rally of a show that seems to celebrate … everything so long as it’s Welsh. The show is crammed with games, guests and grids of children tuning in via Zoom – one recent episode caught up with a chef, a cage-fighting star and a football player who was dialing in from a home office that was decidedly not Room Rater-ready (another football star dialed in from behind the wheel of his car); in another, we were treated to an older man playing the acoustic guitar and singing wistfully about the World Cup. It’s not only men: the award-winning novelist Manon Steffan Ros pitched up to shoot the breeze with the hosts, after which she agreed to kick balls in the direction of a goal. (It’s a shame that more shows don’t ask their guests to stick around and do that.) Throughout it all, in lieu of commercial breaks come annoyingly tempting animated recipe cards for Welsh as well as Spanish (just add jamón!) or Greek (olives!) rarebit.
A Bang triple header was no banger, alas. Nobody should have to watch three hours of humorless conversations in dark rooms, as well as detectives pacing in front of humorously large maps hanging in dark rooms.
All told, after a half-dozen hours of Welsh programming, did this viewer sign up for a course in Cymraeg? Did she laugh, or cry, or tremble? I cannot tell a lie. But, for whatever reason, I am suddenly fixated on finding a live Welsh sheep cam to fire up on my laptop. Something to keep me company till next Wednesday.
• This article was amended on 24 July 2023. An earlier version said that “three quarters” of the population of Wales do not speak Welsh, when the more accurate figure according to the Office for National Statistics is 82%.
