The Cutprice Guignol

I have been waiting for a show like this one.

And the show in question, of course, is none other than Such Brave Girls – after a ridiculously fun first season, the show (created by and starring Kat Sadler) dropped its second series last week, and now that I’ve seen it, I just need to talk about it for a second.

The last few years have seen a real glut of female-led comedies reaching the mainstream – We Are Lady Parts, Henpocalypse!, Deadloch, Am I Being Unreasonable, Alma’s Not Normal, to name just a few – and most of them have, as you can likely tell from the endless adulatory posts on this very site, basically become staples of my comedy viewing. And, make no mistake, these shows have successfully cornered the market on so many different sub-genres and approaches to the world of comedy – from speculative fiction to psycho-thrillers to crime dramas to musicals, there’s hardly a side of television that’s gone unrepresented in these new shows.

But Such Brave Girls, especially with this second season, has successfully delivered something that I have been craving for as long as I can remember – and that’s a female-led comedy that is downright fucking horrible.

And let me put a few caveats here, just before you go off and watch it on my recommendation (which I can only assume you all do with unthinking obedience every time I sort of vaguely gesture in the direction of a new show): Such Brave Girls is one of the bleakest, darkest, most unrelentingly brutal comedies I’ve ever seen.

The premise is broad enough, and could almost pass for something feel-good under different circumstances – Deb (Louise Brealey) and her two daughters Billie (Lizzie Davidson) and Josie (Sadler) attempt to navigate life, love, and sex in their tight-knit family unit. But Such Brave Girls isn’t here for the nice familial back-patting and morals at the end of the day, no – it’s spectacularly funny, precisely because it’s so fucking horrid – it’s not cringe comedy, but a comedy of sheer horror as the unremittingly awful characters warp the world around them to make it that much worse. Aside from the poisonous main cast, Freddie Meredith as the dug-in tick of a live-in partner Seb and Paul Bazely as the oblivious Dev serve as love interests – though perhaps love is rather too strong a word for it – and primary victims of the women’s desperate scrabbling to stay one step ahead. It’s so, so fucking funny, and if that’s all you take away from this post, let it be that.

But I think what I love so much about the show, and what has ultimately elevated it to downright all-timer status for me, is how unique it is in its nastiness. When it came to gross-out or boundary-pushing comedy in the era that I grew up, so much of that genre was dominated by men – a lot of it was good, sure, often great, and there are no doubt plenty of women who have thrived against that backdrop. But Such Brave Girls is a show that’s firmly rooted in womanhood – not just by virtue of it being about three women, but in the way it explores the very worst and most toxic extent of the roles that women are encouraged to fall into, and rolls around gleefully in that dirt as it wrings every inch of comedic value out of that premise. From weaponizing sex to faking miscarriages, there’s not a corner of the toxic feminine that doesn’t serve as fodder for this show, and it’s sensational.

Such Brave Girls takes the worst and most rampantly harmful parts of femaleness and plays them out to their natural end point in the foulest and most creative ways you can imagine. It might be about the titular brave girls on paper, but in my mind, it’s about the distinct and horrible black comedy that can only come from such horrible women.

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(header image via Drama Quarterly)