Frayed: HBO Max’s Charming, Funny, Foul-Mouthed Journey of Reckoning in 1980s Australia

In Frayed, an uber rich Londonite, Simone (show creator Sarah Kendall) goes into freefall when her husband dies suddenly. The circumstances of his death were revealing in all of the wrong ways; he was in flagrante-delicto with a prostitute and also had a cellphone up his bum. Considering that this is the 1980s and the size of cellphones at the time, well … you get the picture. Insult to injury, Simone’s lawyer informs her that her husband had racked up massive debts, necessitating that she sell everything to creditors (even both yachts!) Embarrassed and without resources, Simone returns with her two teenage children to her backwater hometown in Australia, where a web of her self-aggrandizing lies begin to unravel—starting with the fact that she is actually called Sammy.

From there, Frayed diverges from other similar stories in that Sammy has no idea how to pull her life back together. She has no skills and very little to recommend her (imagine if Arrested Development had focused on Lindsay Bluth, more or less). Though she disparages the tiny town she fled after graduating high school, her former classmates are doing well; they are in government, serve as barristers. All except her high school ex Dan (Matt Passmore), now a PE teacher who wears shorts that are way, way too short, and who lives in a trailer in his grandma’s backyard. And so, the former popular party kids are now the outsiders among their (obnoxious) peers, and it’s just one of many reckonings that Sammy must now face.

Though the series feels like it should be a half-hour comedy to start, its tone ultimately makes more sense as an hourlong drama. Frayed is funny, mostly in sophomoric ways (there’s an unusual amount of projectile vomiting), but it is at its best when it’s sincere. Still, Sammy, initially clothed in slip dresses from the 1960s she left behind because her luggage was lost, is humiliated at every turn. Without qualifications, she can’t find her job, her children (Frazer Hadfield and Maggie Ireland-Jones) are bullied at their new school, her hilarious and sweet but deadbeat brother Jim (Ben Mingay) and his scammer girlfriend (Doris Younane) think she’s scheming to take their mother’s house from them, etc. The kids are a mess, but the adults are also in a stunted adolescence (with the exception of Sammy’s mother, played by a luminous Kerry Armstrong, who is trying to stay sober and dips a toe into dating 23 years after being widowed).