In case you're not au fait with Mumsnet, the title of Daisy May Cooper's follow-up creation to the stupendous This Country is a nod to the parenting website's readers' questions corner, where the responses boil down to “Yes, you are” and “No, you're not” in equally judgmental proportions. (Although, it has to be said, sometimes the replies are far from that and can be funny or helpful.)
Cooper plays Nic, a mother who moved into a gorgeous Cotswold village five years ago and has yet to make friends with any of the other mums at the school where her much more mature nine-year-old son, Ollie (Lenny Rush, a scene-stealer) goes.
She's bored, spending her days lounging on the sofa watching rubbish TV, and is in an unsatisfactory marriage with Dan (Dustin Demri-Burns). She posts questions on Mumsnet's AIBU? section such as: “Does anyone else’s husband give them the ick so much their fanny dries up?”. So when single mum Jen (co-creator Selin Hizli), moves into the village, Nic is ripe for bonding over Jen's casual use of the word “cunt” about another bossy mum at the school gates and they neck the gins in a tin she whips out of her bag at the school fete. They later have a play date (an evening of drinking and a kitchen disco) while Dan takes their sons out bowling.
The first episode moved at a cracking pace, efficiently establishing the characters and setting the scene for the following five in which we'll learn more of the secret that Nic hides, and the gut-wrenching pain beneath her breezy exterior. But why was there a look between Jen and Dan when they met? And why did Jen record the heart to heart she had with Nic when Nic was so smashed she couldn't remember what she had said the next day?
The piece is described as a comedy thriller, but the first two episodes gave more of the former rather than the latter. Nic's cleaner Viv (Juliet Cowan), for instance, is forever telling wonderfully melodramatic “It was the worst experience of my life” stories – including one that includes one of the many fart gags in the show, when Ollie connected a fart blaster to Nic and Dan's surround-sound audio system and scared her witless.
But one suspects the show is going to get a lot darker as secrets and lies – not just Nic's – are revealed and the twists, and sudden changes in tone and timeframe, all begin to make sense. Worth bingeing on.
- Am I Being Unreasonable? continues on BBC One and the whole series is available on iPlayer
- Read more TV reviews on theartsdesk
