Delightfully Unhinged Dark Comedy Such Brave Girls Is Better Than Ever In Season 2
(Photo: Hulu)
In our current streaming era, it’s pretty normal to miss a lot of good TV. It’s not ideal, but it’s understandable, if only because there’s genuinely more content getting released these days than any of us could hope to expect to watch. This is a lot to say that if you haven’t heard of Such Brave Girls, the British series that returns to Hulu for its second season this week, don’t worry. Most Americans probably haven’t. But consider this an exhortation to fix your life immediately, if only because this feral, chaotic, unquantifiable dark comedy also happens to be one of the best things on TV at the moment—even as it gleefully pushes the boundaries of what a “comedy” is meant to be and do.
To be clear, Such Brave Girls is not a series for the faint of heart. The story of a dysfunctional family wrestling with mental health issues, relationship drama, financial woes, and lingering abandonment issues, the series is bleak, biting, and uncomfortably cringe by turns. Its leads are often (possibly even most of the time) deeply unlikeable people. Its humor is frequently uncomfortable, crude, and even downright cruel. Yet, there’s also nothing else like it on either side of the pond: Brutally honest, narratively unhinged, and utterly fearless in every way that counts, it’s a coming-of-age story that skewers everything from feminism and self-help platitudes to sisterhood and mental health services.
The story follows twenty-something sisters Josie (Kat Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson), who live with their self-absorbed mother, Deb (Louise Brealey), in a too-small house in Crawley, England. The girls are different flavors of self-absorbed: Josie is a repressed lesbian dating the dishrag-esque Seb (Freddie Meredith), who never seems to notice she’s not as into him as he wants her to be, while Billie chases after Nicky (Sam Buchanan), a bad boy type who’s willing to use her for everything from sex to a drug mule, but who refuses to say the L-word. While Billie is loud, bullish, and completely nonchalant about being completely inappropriat —in the series’ first season, she showed up for an abortion appointment dressed in a witch’s costume from her day job at Kidz Corner—Josie is depressed and anxious, fixating on women she’s too afraid to attempt a relationship with, and almost pathologically incapable of standing up for herself.
The series’ six-episode second season (all of which were available for review) takes everything that was both shocking and profound about its first and turns it up to eleven. Deb, who opens the season by reminding her daughters that the family motto is “Ignore. Repress. Forget,” is busy trying to stay on top of all the lies she’s told her boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely), a widower with an allegedly “massive house” who’s meant to be their meal ticket out of the financial troubles that have befallen the family ever since the girls’ father disappeared. Kidnapped and forced to marry the boyfriend she only marginally tolerates, Josie wrestles with ongoing questions surrounding her sexual identity, becoming fixated on a local student named Charlie (Rebekah Murrell), a move that takes her character to some shockingly dark places throughout the season.