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'You, Me and the Apocalypse': Funny ending

NBC’s British-made series about the end of the world boasts sharp writing, some familiar faces.

YOU, ME AND THE APOCALYPSE
8 p.m. Thursday, NBC10.

Maybe the end really is near.

In the same week Fox brought back The X-Files and launched the comical cop show Lucifer - about you-know-who - NBC has found the funny in the end of the world.

Turns out it was waiting on the other side of the Atlantic.

You, Me and the Apocalypse, which premieres Thursday, was made in Britain for people who drive on the wrong side of the road, but it should be right at home on NBC, thanks to a cast that includes Jenna Fischer (The Office), Rob Lowe (Parks and Recreation), and Megan Mullally (Will & Grace).

Lowe, who also stars with Fred Savage in Fox's The Grinder, is having a good year.

Here he's a Roman Catholic priest whose job as a professional skeptic makes him the Vatican's go-to guy in the weeks before a comet is expected to hit the earth. Assisted by a young nun (Gaia Scodellaro), with whom he's both mildly flirtatious and adorably chaste, he's traveling the globe, sussing out false messiahs as the clock ticks on mankind.

Mathew Baynton (The Wrong Mans) does double duty as a bank manager in Slough, England, whose wife disappeared seven years ago, and as the evil twin he didn't know he had.

Across the pond, Fischer's character, a single mother who's believed to be a cyber-terrorist, has a not-so-cute meeting with the scary fellow inmate (Mullally), who's about to become her new best friend.

Eventually, we're led to believe, some or all of these characters and a few others we'll meet along the way will find themselves riding out the end of the world in a bunker - theirs is the DNA meant to keep humanity going after a mass extinction.

It's all happening at a manic pace, but the five episodes I've seen - of a 10-episode season - are smartly written, heartfelt, and frequently funny. And if most of us aren't going to make it to the bunker, why not at least die laughing?

A history of 'Disorder'

The latest installment of Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, the ongoing historical documentary series by Sam Katz's History Making Productions, will premiere at 7:30 p.m. Thursday on 6ABC.

Narrated by Michael Boatman (The Good Wife, Instant Mom), Disorder: 1820-1854 deals with those decades before the Civil War during which Philadelphia as we know it didn't yet exist. A border city between the North and South, it was also a collection of 29 separately governed towns, a place of industry but also of uneasy race relations.

The civil disorder in Disorder peaks in 1838, when a national gathering of abolitionists saw their meeting place, the new Pennsylvania Hall, burned to the ground by antiblack rioters, and again six years later, with anti-Catholic riots that increased interest in the city's eventual consolidation.

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