We’ve talked before about the “likeable/funny” matrix we have going on in our heads. To summarize, the only quadrant of that matrix that doesn’t work is “unlikable/unfunny.” Even “likable/unfunny” works at times, though not that often. As far as we’re concerned, though, the sweet spot is in the “unlikable/funny” quadrant, mainly because the humor indicates that there is some depth to that unlikable character. The British comedy Such Brave Girls demonstrates that with all three of its main characters.
Opening Shot: South London University. Josie (Kat Sadler) sees Charlie (Rebekah Murrell), an art student she’s crushing on. Charlie invites her to her pottery showing that day, and they sit next to each other in a lecture.
The Gist: Suddenly Josie’s mother Deb (Louise Brealey) and sister Billie (Lizzie Davidson) burst into the lecture, grab Josie and put a hood over her head. They take it off in front of a hotel and tell her it’s “the happiest day of your life,” aka her wedding to Seb (Freddie Meredith).
As far as Deb is concerned, the ultimate goal for both her daughters should be to become a “kept woman,” despite the fact that a) Josie likes women and wants to go to art school, and b) Seb works as a “croupier” at a casino, as the back of his tux jacket indicates.
As Seb nervously gets ready — wanting to take his socks off to cool down — he asks Dev (Paul Bazely) to be his best man. Given it’s like 40 minutes before the wedding, Dev says yes, and they decide to have a mini-stag right there in the hotel room. For a stag prank, Seb calls his workplace, “disguises” his voice, and threatens to shoot the place up. Too bad he didn’t block his number before calling.
Josie has no desire to get married to Seb, and tries to sneak out in Deb’s car “Hector”t, but ends up crashing it when Deb dives across the dashboard. In the meantime, Deb keeps trying to persuade Dev to get married, but Dev seems cool to the idea; he’s even cooler to the idea when Deb’s sister Wendy (Kate Fleetwood), invited to show Josie what “divorced spinsterhood” looks like, lets slip a detail about Deb’s previous marriage that Dev didn’t know about.
Billie wants to show off her new “mature” boyfriend Graham (Daniel Ryan), who in Billie’s eyes is either 70 or “a 50 year-old who’s really tired.” Since Deb has told her it’s not a real relationship until they have sex, Billie wants to do it right in Josie’s honeymoon suite. One problem: Graham is married to an “ugly old neurosurgeon,” and has never cheated before.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Such Brave Girls seems to have the same rapid-fire dialogue and semi-amoral feel of Am I Being Unreasonable?
Our Take: Sadler, who created Such Brave Girls, is certainly leaning on the bawdiness a little more in Season 2. Not that Deb and her daughters weren’t bawdy in Season 1, it feels like their dirty minds shift into overdrive as they get more desperate to land their respective men — or in the case of Josie, her woman.
What we do know is that Josie really is trying to break out of the needy mode set by her mother, who is fairly obviously been severely hurt by the girls’ father and other men in her life. Deb’s twisted views on relationships have filtered down to Josie and Billie, and Billie still seems to be following her mother’s insane axioms, like the idea that a relationship isn’t real until penetrative sex has occurred.
But Josie is starting to pull away from that notion, which will likely be the theme of most of Season 2’s story. Everyone knows that the marriage to Seb is a sham; in fact, Deb is using it more as a way to get Dev to commit than anything else. Billie even knows where her sister’s desires lie, saying that after the wedding “you’ll be scissoring next to ceramics by 2.”
The added dynamic in Season 2 is that the men in these women’s lives — Dev, Seb and now Graham — wouldn’t even rise to the level of beta males. These are awkward men whom the trio can control, though not without issues. Will Dev, for instance, back away from Deb now that he really knows how her marriage ended? Will Graham risk his seemingly good marriage for Billie? Will Seb want more from Josie than to just “keep” her?
What we like is that Sadler continues to combine broad, dirty jokes with subtle ones that sometimes takes the viewers a beat, but leave them satisfied once they get the joke. And she continues to mine funny material from these three women’s collective romantic damage and how they look at relationships because of it.
Sex and Skin: In this episode, the sex is all talk. There may be actual action during the season, but it’ll tend to be clothed action.
Parting Shot: Josie finally agrees to have “the happiest day” of her life, but tells Deb that she completely totaled “Hector” in the parking lot. Given that “Hector” was the only thing keeping Deb from going off the deep end, we’ll see how she reacts to that.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Kate Fleetwood as Wendy, who tries to convince herself that the divorced life is the best life, but everyone knows she’s lying — including her.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m not your sloppy seconds, I’m the whole fucking buffet!” Billie says to Graham after finding out he’s married.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Once you understand the pain that’s underneath the twisted viewpoints of Deb, Josie and Billie, you realize how subversively funny Such Brave Girls really is. This show is definitely a case where the unlikable becomes likable because of how they channel their inner turmoil into really funny comedy.
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.