The series centres around Gerald Wright, manager of the health and safety department of the fictional Baselricky Council implied to be in Essex. Wright's team includes Malika Maha, Clive Beeches, and Bernard Stanning. His family includes daughter Susan and her girlfriend Victoria, and ex-wife Valerie.
Characters
Gerald Wright – a middle aged divorcee who is the Chief Health and Safety officer for Baselricky Borough Council. He takes his job very seriously, and appears diligent, although slightly paranoid about the 'dangers' of everyday situations. His ex-wife Valerie left him, after they had been married for over twenty years, because she could not take his 'stick-to-the-rules' persona any longer. He lives with his daughter Susan and her girlfriend Victoria. He appears to have been deeply affected by the divorce, and Susan correctly deduces that his anxiety and anger over simple things is a mask to cover his depressioncaused by the end of his marriage. Also, although he clearly loves his only child Susan very much, he describes her coming out as a lesbian as a 'lifestyle bombshell' and he may secretly be slightly uncomfortable by his daughter's homosexuality. He argues a lot with Susan's live-in girlfriend Victoria, but deep down he has grown to love her like a second daughter.
Susan Wright – Gerald's 23-year-old daughter. Since the divorce of her parents and her mother moving out, the responsibility of running the house has fallen to Susan, and she is now responsible for food shopping, paying bills, working as a plumber and looking after her equally invalid father and girlfriend. She plays the 'straight man' in comparison to Gerald's neurotic behaviour and Victoria's naivety. However, she clearly loves her father very much, and is shown to be very much in love with Victoria, despite her being far less intelligent than Susan. Also, Susan is shown to care very much for her mother, and tries to make her see that her new Australian boyfriend Kyle is just using her for her divorce settlement money.
Victoria – Susan's 19-year old, incompetent girlfriend. She is a disc jockey, although she gets very little work and has been mockingly nicknamed 'DJ No-Gigs' by people on the internet. She is quite posh compared to Susan and Gerald, yet she is openly in love with Susan, and has developed emotional attachment to Gerald.
Critics heavily panned the first episode. The second episode was heavily criticised by Tom Phillips in the New Statesman, who found it to be even worse than the first. Adam Postans in the Daily Mirror called it 'the worst sitcom ever'. Oliver Nagel of German blog britcoms.de included it in an article on "The Shitcoms of the year", commenting: "Worst. Sitcom. Ever.", "Gags that can hardly be described as such, dogmatism that speculates on approving laughter, gruesome characters - really everything is wrong here" and "With 'The Wright Way' Ben Elton has reached the very bottom."
