Want to know why Netflix is in trouble? Watch Mike Myers’ infantile new comedy

Let’s cut straight to the chase. However much Netflix paid Mike Myers for this six-part comedy series, they should donate the same amount to the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. Only then will there be a silver lining to this staggeringly unfunny, horrendously bloated, ego-driven, faeces-obsessed white elephant. Netflix raised our subscription fees for this? For shame.

In fairness, you can understand Netflix’s motivation – Myers hasn’t created his own project since 2008’s abysmal The Love Guru and his heyday is now more than a decade ago. A new comedy from the man who gave us Wayne’s World and Austin Powers? Why ever not! And you can’t blame Myers for being lured out of semi-retirement by a great heaving sack of Netflix swag. Then, of course, there is the famous Netflix creative freedom. And the famous Netflix production budgets. This all, alas, has added up to a stinking broth of scatological humour, unearned winks to the camera and Shrek-fisted attempts at meta-humour that leave Myers looking like a comedy dinosaur.

The conceit – taken from a throwaway gag from Myers’ 1993 film So I Married an Axe Murderer – is that in 1347, disturbed by the authorities’ belief that the Black Death was a judgment from god, a group of learned men formed The Pentaverate, a benevolent secret society bent on influencing the world. Their members over the centuries have included everyone from Darwin and Da Vinci to KFC’s Colonel Sanders and “the Quaker Oats guy”. That’s one of the better jokes.

Myers, naturally, plays half the characters (the man deserves some credit for the sheer amount of time that he must have spent having the prosthetics applied). This is no bad thing – Myers is a gifted performer, his ability with accents is nothing short of incredible, and the make-up work befits the gargantuan budget.

His Pentaverate members are spot-on – a Rupert Murdoch-alike Australian media mogul, an oddball Russian oligarch, a crusty old toff called Lord Lordington and, bizarrely, the real-life rock band manager Shep Gordon – and it’s impossible not to warm to the show’s central character, Ken Scarborough, a gentle Canadian local news reporter whose old-fashioned nature is about to get him the sack. Myers does lend some of his prosthetics to Jennifer Saunders, who turns up as some vague sort of mystic, but the less said of that the better.

However, after a smattering of neat jokes about Canada – Ken’s network has a game show called Close Enough: “where to win, you only have to be close enough” – the whole thing descends into one long, diamond-encrusted fart gag. Ken’s channel is called Caca News (caca, like poo, you see?), The Pentaverate’s latest member (Keegan-Michael Key, who needs to sack his agent) “dies” after attempting to kiss his own anus, The Pentaverate’s supercomputer has the personality of a crude Bostonian who makes “your mom” jokes at everyone, a hotel is called “Big Dick’s Half Way Inn”. If you found Austin Powers’s grotesque, flatulent Fat Bastard the very height of comedy, well, even you might be disappointed.

Every character is either defecating or talking about defecating or about to defecate (or at the very least about to fart). It's as if someone animated the Bristol Stool Chart. When Ken infiltrates The Pentaverate he has to undergo a “foreskin tug test”, which is exactly what it sounds like. The humour is so crass it would test the patience of my two-year-old, who is currently going through a phase of picking his nose, eating it, then shouting “I’m funny!”. He is certainly funnier than The Pentaverate.

Of course, the puerility is entirely knowing and deliberate, slathered on too thick as some sort of ironic nod to the very concept of humour. But it never lands. Witness one scene, in which the characters are bizarrely foul-mouthed, which we get to see for a second time with the profanity removed.

The joke – haha – is that the scene becomes even cruder. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, the US comic actor Ken Jeong turns up with a performance of such crass charmlessness that it will make you long for the government to ban all transatlantic travel. All of this, somehow, is directed by the brilliant British film-maker Tim Kirkby, whose credits include Look Around You, Veep, Fleabag and the superb Don’t Forget the Driver.

Netflix’s woes have been well-publicised, but until they can spend their money more sensibly, subscriptions will keep plummeting. The Pentaverate is not just a flop, it is an eye-wateringly expensive one, with glorious sweeping shots of New York, wonderfully elaborate sets, an almost entirely pointless scene in Dubrovnik (featuring a cameo from the Myers canon that will make your jaw drop) and a glitzy supporting cast.

The streaming service recently parted with $300m for the services of the revered TV auteur Ryan Murphy, whose output has either been dross (Ratched, Hollywood) or forgettable (Halston, The Politician). Blackish creator Kenya Barris was given $100m, but left after one production, citing the fact that Netflix wanted him to be too mainstream. The streamer has seen success by throwing money at Adam Sandler, Ricky Gervais and Shonda Rimes (Bridgerton), but subscribers were initially lured in by the award-worthy and the critically acclaimed, not by populist dreck.

The Pentaverate is a cavalcade of toilet humour that deserves nothing more than to be flushed away. Groovy, baby. Not.