Even as a child, I was never one for holiday cheer. The only festive film I liked growing up was The Nightmare Before Christmas—in particular, the part where Christmas is ruined—and when I was singing in the school choir for the annual candlelit carol service, I only really liked the sinister tracks. (My favorite was the splendidly eerie “Coventry Carol,” which, it turns out, is actually about babies being slaughtered.)
So you’ll have to forgive me if my recommendation for something “you really should have” watched this year—and that I’m encouraging you to dive into over the holidays—errs on the darker side. I was first introduced to Such Brave Girls, a blacker-than-black comedy from the BBC (and available to watch on Hulu in the US), by my friend Charlie, who recommended it to me based on my love of Julia Davis’s gleefully unhinged Nighty Night, my favorite TV show of all time. (I even managed to strongarm my American colleagues into including it in Vogue’s list of the greatest TV shows of the 21st century.)
Like Nighty Night, Such Brave Girls takes a sledgehammer to the flimsy framework of manners that keeps the British social construct (barely) hanging together, exposing the malice and envy that so often lie beneath the politeness. (If you think I’m exaggerating about all that malice and envy, by the way, just leaf through a British tabloid.) The trio of characters who make up the dysfunctional family at the show’s center are Josie, a suicidally depressed, bisexual twentysomething (played by Kat Sadler, the show’s talented creator); her chaotic narcissist of a younger sister, Billie (played by Sadler’s real-life sister, Lizzie Davidson); and their single mother, Deb (played with exquisite nastiness by Louise Brealey), who was left in financial ruin when their husband walked out a decade before, and is now trying to secure a “Willy Wonka ticket out of hell” by ensnaring the hapless but wealthy widower Dev into marriage. I think the word Charlie used to describe it was “depraved”; I was sold.
And I was delighted to discover the show lived up to those lofty promises. In the first episode alone, Deb concocts a false backstory that her husband died (complete with a visit to a random man’s grave) to bond with Dev, before yelling at Josie to stop killing Dev’s sex drive with her permanently mopey facial expression. (She frequently reminds her daughters of the Johnson family motto: “Ignore, repress, forget.”) In episode three, Billie leaves her job at the children’s soft play center, “Kidz Cauldron,” to go for an abortion, breezing past the possibility of changing out of her work clothes—in this case, a Wicked Witch of the West costume, complete with prosthetic nose and green body paint. The first shot of her in the clinic waiting room in full witch regalia, and the nurse’s puzzled look at her getup, had me weeping with laughter.
After devouring the first season in a matter of days, I moved on to Season 2, which dropped in July. It continues in an equally vicious, vulgar mode. (Well, on the surface at least.) Sure, the family members are all up to their usual hijinks: Josie is kidnapped by her mother at art college and marched to a surprise wedding with her deadbeat boyfriend Seb, then tries to get herself institutionalized to escape him; Billie enters into a tumultuous “sugar baby” relationship with the much-older Graham; and Deb is desperately trying to claw her way back into Dev’s favor after he discovers she lied about her ex-husband dying. Along the way, all of them continue to use self-help buzzwords and weaponized therapy speak to justify being terrible people. (There’s a memorable scene in which Billie develops a thesis that being a mistress is somehow feminist.)
And yet, Such Brave Girls isn’t quite as misanthropic as I might be making it sound. You can’t help but root for Josie, especially as she tries to spread her wings in Season 2, exploring her creative passions and her sexuality even while remaining the perpetual family punching bag. And you can’t help feeling a little sorry for Billie, whose endless quest for validation from disinterested men is undoubtedly a result of her upbringing, as we watch her mother continue to stomp all over her daughters to secure herself a financial life raft. Even Deb is the victim of a very British strain of class anxiety—not only trying to survive, but trying to deflect the shame of being a poor single mother in a society that hates poor single mothers.
And, of course, there’s the beating heart of the thing: the loyalty and genuine care the two sisters share for one another, even if it’s a bond forged by trauma, and often expressed in the most toxic and destructive of ways. So, yes, I encourage anyone with a taste for gallows humor to try this delicious poisoned pudding of a show over the holiday break. And if you find it all too unrelentingly bleak? You can always take a leaf out of the Johnson family playbook and ignore, repress, forget.
