It feels like we’ve seen a lot of “woman 30 or over looking for The One” series in the past few years. The romantic plots can sometimes blur together, but they all ride on the relative charms of their stars. A new Swedish romantic dramedy, based on a hit novel, has a similar vibe.
Opening Shot: A woman jogs in the streets of Malmö, Sweden. She gets to a park and stops, when she sees a young man in a jogging suit about 30 feet away take his penis out.
The Gist: Instead of running in the other direction, or at least thinking the behavior was gross, Amanda (Carla Sehn) stares instead, even taking a step or two towards the young perv. At least this is the story she tells her sister Adina (Moah Madsen) and mother Monika (Ingela Olsson). Why did she even look at that guy? Well, she’s been so busy working in the last decade, especially in the event-planning-and-design business that she started with her mother and sister, she’s barely had time to date. She hasn’t even had sex in 3 years. But she’s ready to find The One.
Her hippy-ish mother reminds Amanda that she “married the Cosmos,” but Amanda is ready to file for a fake divorce from that fake marriage. The sisters go out with their friends Jabba (Dilan Apak), Lilleman (Malou Marnfeldt) and Ronja (Zahraa Aldoujaili), and Amanda sees Emil Wester (Johannes Lindkvist), who chased her when she kissed him in 7th grade. When they run into each other outside the bathroom, it’s awkward, but there is definitely something there. Later, as she “divorces the Cosmos” by throwing out an old ring, her neighbor comes out to toss out his trash, and they have a moment.
The ladies go clubbing the next night, with Amanda determined to just flirt and see what happens. She and the more outgoing Lilleman act as each other’s wingperson, and Amanda meets a toothy consultant (Victor Iván) in a fleece vest. Since they’re getting along, she decides to go home with him. Sex with him is… interesting, and she’s shocked when he wants her to leave right afterwards. But that doesn’t mean that she’s not interested in seeing him again, even if Adina tells her to let him down gently.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A direct comparison to Diary Of A Ditched Girl is Sex And The City, but it also resembles similarly-plotted shows like Love Life, How To Die Alone, Survival Of The Thickest, Shrill and others.
Our Take: Diary Of A Ditched Girl is based on a novel by Amanda Romare; it’s titled Halva Malmö består av killar som dumpat mig, loosely translated to mean Half of Malmö’s Men Have Dumped Me. It’s an apt title for a show where Amanda is flailing around in pursuit of real love and companionship. It definitely feels like a show we’ve seen before, but we appreciate watching Amanda’s attempts to get in the game.
This comes down to the charm of Carla Sehn, last seen earlier this year in the very different series The Åre Murders. She plays Amanda with some literal wide-eyed charm and a looseness with her physicality that’s fun to watch. Sure, she’s playing a pretty bog-standard thirtysomething woman in the 2020s who wants to find love — but she’ll start with getting laid — and is just going to let her libido lead her. But Sehn makes Amanda into a person who is all in on this quest, not a sad sack who thinks she’s not worthy of love or being desired.
The friends around Amanda and her sister Adina seem to have their personality quirks, but we don’t really get much insight into them yet, except for one of the friends, whom we’ll mention below. We also wish we got a little more insight into Amanda’s life beyond working with her sister and mother, but romantic dramedies like this tend to drop us into their protagonists’ lives without a whole lot of backstory. We just know that they’re about to turn 30 or have already passed it, and they’ve neglected their love lives for too long — or want to get back to a more active love life after a long, unfulfilling relationship ends.
Sex and Skin: Definitely both. Sehn seems comfortable just walking around topless, like in a scene where she’s talking to Adina on the phone while sitting on the toilet. But that sex scene with the consultant is fun to watch because of how awkward it is.
Parting Shot: Amanda is about to blow off the consultant, who wants to see her but also wants to go back to date an ex, but erases that text and replaces it with “Sure, that’s fine by me.”
Sleeper Star: Malou Marnfeldt’s character Milleman is definitely the Samantha of the group; she brings a whip to the club as a way to introduce herself to guys, as she asks them if they want to get a smack in the butt.
Most Pilot-y Line: Amanda wonders why her mother has her in her phone as “La Bamba,” when someone remembers the Ritchie Valens song. But she still doesn’t know what that means.
Our Call: STREAM IT. As we said, we’ve seen shows like Diary Of A Ditched Girl a number of times, but Carla Sehn’s charms help make what could be a tired premise worth watching.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.