A quiche? For intercoursing on my wife?!?

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2021

#18 : Back To Life

Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon’s Hythe-set comedy-drama returned in just as good shape as it left us: a sad, strange tale about the reputations we cannot shake. Exquisitely observed, sensitively performed and gorgeous to look at. Who could ask for more?

I'd heard of this and was intrigued by it because the reviews seemed to suggest it was a comedy based around a subject entirely unsuitable for a comedy but it still kinda worked.  I hadn't watched the first season, but suspected I needed to - so, like Julie Andrews, let's start at the very beginning...

And it is indeed a sad, strange tale.  Daisy Haggard plays Miri who's just out of prison for something a bit murder-y and unsurprisingly, that reputation does prove tricky to shake.  Initially, she doesn't think she needs to shake it but we follow her on her journey as she learns things aren't quite that easy.

Season 1 is an odd mix - it starts off mostly focussing on the mundane (albeit in a very unusual setting), moves on to focus on relationships, then introduces a mystery, drip-fed with back story, which just happens to include further death and arson along the way.  Wrapping it all up with a town meeting - obviously.  And it all manages to pull some quite hefty emotion together - I guessed where it was going, but it still managed to get me.  And it has a lovely ending - “What changed your mind?”  “Well, I thought about everything, decided it was all a bit shit - so I got us two ice creams”.  If only life was that easy, eh?

Season 2 starts with her having EVEN WORSE hair - which is quite a surprise if you’ve watched Season 1.  And it is kinda the same, but also kinda different - I don't think I really need to give you any more details than that.  If you liked (or, from the description above. thought you might like) season 1, then you'll also like season 2.  I'm not sure I'd say it's better but it manages to be different - focussing more on the potent mix of grief and hope.  You would have thought that season 1 would have found some time to consider grief, but there was always too much else going on.  Introducing the parents of the murder victim as characters in this season gives an obvious focus, but it takes time to consider other forms of grief around loss of friendships and relationships - and the hope (and work) involved in rekindling them. 

Well, until the start of episode 4 anyway when the curviest of curve balls appears from nowhere.  Episodes 4 and 5 are just doozies - the rug is well and truly pulled in a way you're not expecting.  All of which sets up a potentially heavy and depressing episode 6, but (once again) things don't quite pan out the way you're expecting with a really well put together conclusion.

Daisy Haggard is very good in this but it's written in such a way that it's easy for you to think she's just a bit weird.  Which, I guess, she is.  A lot of her role involves her reacting to other people from a position of relative innocence (being a bit murder-y is going to get you locked away for a bit - 18 years in this case) and she does that well.  But she also has to carry the show and she does that admirably doing some heavy lifting at times - you totally invest in her character.

Considering the rest of the cast, Geraldine James who plays Miri's mum) definitely deserves the first mention because she's brilliant in this - as she is in everything she does.  I was trying to remember where I first saw her and I think it was in Blott On The Landscape (in 1985!).  She deserves special mention here both for her SPECTACULARLY unsexy sex scenes and the way she delivers the following sentence “it’s extremely rare for me to use the <c-word> word and I only do so when referring to utter <c-words>”.  Btw, this is probably the c-wordiest thing I've ever seen, which was very much unexpected.  

We can't praise Geraldine though without also praising Richard Durden who plays her husband in a very different, but co-dependant way - they need each other but also don't have much in common, which makes for an interesting relationship, particularly when Miri is also brought into the mix.

And Adeel Akhtar is very good as well in a role that's probably best not overly described (I really liked him in Utopia as well, but he's very different in this!).  I could actually go through all the cast because they all do a great job, but I'm going to call out Jo Martin as Janice the parole officer who is brilliantly nuts and Adrian Edmondsen who has a complex role as the father of the victim (he only appears in season 2).

So lots of good acting, but what enables them to do all that good acting is the incredibly good job which is done on the writing front.  It's an unusual topic for a drama, let alone a comedy-drama but the writing uses it really well, whilst also bringing in minutiae from all areas of life and weaving them all together exceptionally.  The characters are all (to a certain degree) larger than life, but they contain enough grains of truth to make them relatable which is impressive.  Part of the reason I avoided watching this was because I was expecting it to be grim, but (to its credit) it's anything but grim - which is disarming.  It is also beautifully filmed with some lovely landscape shots in it.

All in all, I think this is well worth a watch - I was drawn to all the characters, but obviously Miri in particular and at times when it looks like it's all going to go horribly wrong for her, I was really holding out hope that it wouldn't.  As The Guardian says, it is a sad, strange tale but it's one with a lot of heart and a lot of hope.  And a lot of c words.  Make sure you start it from the beginning though - you won't regret it.

#17 - A nicely nuanced series
#19 - One you've probably already seen