For most of her life, Kat Sadler has been collecting Such Brave Girls content. She plays the lead role of Josie in the largely autobiographical comedy, who has a long history of mental illness, sadness and suicidal ideation. After attempting suicide twice, Sadler was hospitalized a few years ago. She told this to her sister Lizzie Davidson at the beginning of lockdown. Davidson revealed to Sadler that she owed £20,000 in concealment. As they laughed, Sadler recognized that she could turn this fodder into something beautiful.
Davidson plays Billie, Josie's sister, in the comedy that Sadler eventually created, which is steeped in sisterly bonds and a tendency to laugh at tragedy.
Creator: Kat Sadler
Stars: Kat Sadler, Louise Brealey, Lizzie Davidson
Brotherly bonds and a propensity to laugh in the face of disaster infuse the comedy that Sadler ultimately created (which also features Davidson as Josie's sister, Billie). This is her first TV show (she's a writer-turned-comedian for The Mash Report and Joe Lycett's Got Your Back), but she suffers only minimally from a lack of experience.
The first few episodes don't establish the characters or dynamics firmly enough and drag a bit because the jokes are spread out too far apart. But the bleak world of the depressed and insecure Josie (who has internalized the pain of a traumatic childhood and her father's abandonment 10 years earlier) and the overconfident (read: equally insecure) Billie has come together in episode three. The rest of the series flies on wings of malevolent delight.
It retains the glorious lack of sentimentality and cruelty with which it begins. Their mother, Deb (Louise Brealey, in wonderful form as a borderline unloving mother) has a new boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely, walking the line between unfortunate and creepy), and is spitting private threats to get the girls to talk. behave. in front of him. Her father left the family burdened with debt and she needs to find a financially stable man. “I'm going to call him Dad,” Josie says, as the sisters converge in a rare moment of unity to decide her strategy. “I'm going to call him Dad,” Billie agrees. "But only in a sexual way."
From there, we explore Billie's devotion to Nicky (Sam Buchanan), the toxic man of her dreams; Josie struggles with her sexuality as she falls in love with a woman (Jude Mack), but is hired to give handjobs twice a week to her possessive boyfriend, Seb (Freddie Meredith); and Deb's increasingly debilitating web of lies to maintain her relationship with Dev, despite her fondness for her iPad and the fact that she pays for everything.
It is a world populated by narcissists and traumatized people in which nothing works well or is true. Josie's mental health problems only infuriate Deb ("I won't have an eating disorder in this house"), who, at best, urges her to stop thinking, stop loving, and stop letting go. enter “big feelings.” It takes pregnancy (Billie worries that having Nicky's baby will make her seem “too available” to him), abortion, cocaine clubbing, camping, religious epiphany, dead wives, the pulverization of hope and ambition ( “You're only good for psychiatrists,” Deb says when Josie mentions being praised during her art therapy class and all the negatives in between. It's appropriately brutal and appropriately funny.
There's a particular joy in watching a show directed and written by women that pulls no punches and delights in plumbing the depths. Her grandmother's candid but (probably) false testimony about how her caretakers took her out and beat her at night is one of the show's smaller moments, but it's perfectly indicative of its tone and her triumph.
Such Brave Girls is truly brave – singular, fresh, scabrous and unflinching – but still – or, rather, as a result – hilarious.
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