I thought I had the measure of Smothered. This romcom is written by Monica Heisey, the Schitt’s Creek and Workin’ Moms writer whose debut novel, Really Good, Actually, was a big hit this year, so I imagined that I knew what this was going to be like. I expected an acidic comedy dripping with sharp observations about modern dating and the impossibility of cliched romantic love. What I didn’t expect was for Smothered to be quite as lovely as it turns out to be.
It is being pushed as a romcom with a twist, a fresh update on a well-worn genre that is trying hard to revive itself after a couple of decades in the wilderness. The early signs are that it is doing just that. Sammy (Danielle Vitalis) is in her early 20s and we meet her at a sex club, where she talks too much about her intimacy issues to the stranger she’s trying to hook up with. She leaves long, drunken, rambling voice notes for an ex whom she has saved in her phone under a “do not call” name, veering between being nice, angry and telling him he’s an “iron-deficient prick” – which is, somehow, a very funny insult.
Tom (Jon Pointing), meanwhile, is 30, has a reliable office job to which he comes in early, and where he eats boiled eggs at his desk. On the surface, he is the older counterpoint to Sammy’s youthful chaos, but he is struggling to meet a partner “in the wild” and the apps aren’t doing it for him. “Everyone’s into choking?” he says unhappily. This being a romcom, Sammy and Tom are thrown together at karaoke, get on really well, and then, because there has to be a gimmick, decide to have a three-week affair, “like a real one, from the past”, at which point they’ll delete each other’s numbers and go their separate ways.
This is what I mean by thinking I had the measure of it. It’s a contrived setup that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, an “insane scheme full of fake rules” that is obviously going to be thwarted by their true feelings for each other. It isn’t quite clear why they would do it, other than so that this particular romcom has its USP. But there is a twist at the end of episode one that throws it into different territory and reveals its true colours. The three-week stunt is short-lived, rather than forming the basis of the whole thing and it quickly dispenses with the faff.
What it turns into is something far nicer. Each episode takes a different theme as its starting point. If episode one is about meeting someone, then the rest of the series covers the practicalities of dating, how to combine responsibilities and commitments, when and how to introduce someone to your friends and family members, and the difference between being in your early 20s and early 30s. Conflict peeks its weary head over the parapet, has a look around, makes a brief nuisance of itself then disappears, because everyone has talked about their problems like people do in real life and sorted it all out.
I realise that this might not be selling it: a romcom about love’s more practical details which doesn’t pretend that everyday arguments are anything more than that. But the secret is in the sauce, and this is dry, sweet, well-written and extremely easy to watch in one greedy sitting. If Sammy and Tom getting together is the tinsel, then it’s hung on the tree of modern life in London. They try to keep it casual, they try to keep it formal, and in the end, the circumstances of life force them to find their own way through it. It is in this sense that it becomes unique.
As well as Vitalis and Pointing, who has previous at charming everyone to bits in Big Boys, there is a solid cast, with a steady appearance of familiar faces from British and Irish comedy and elsewhere. Aisling Bea is Gillian, who is opening a restaurant; Sammy’s boss (Lisa Hammond) is the interior designer in charge of the project. But Smothered’s London is small and Gillian ends up being a bigger part of Sammy’s life than she perhaps imagined she might be. Stath Lets Flats’ Ellie White appears, while Rebecca Lucy Taylor (AKA the musician Self Esteem) is one of Sammy’s flatmates, in a flat where the toilet is permanently broken. There is even a cameo from Jay Rayner, playing himself.
Despite the lack of friction, it feels rich and assured, as if all the maturity of not being in your early 20s any more has trickled down and blessed it with wisdom. If this is what a romcom with a twist is, then I like it a lot.
• Smothered is on Sky Comedy in the UK and Binge in Australia
