Has a living nightmare ever been so howlingly funny? After mainlining the second series of Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli’s deeply unsettling dramedy about a woman in the throes of a nervous breakdown – one fuelled by a) her husband chucking her out for having an affair with his late brother; b) the guilt of having secretly killed said brother; c) anxiety about her son’s murderous tendencies, and d) finding out her new best friend’s favourite hobby is recording their private conversations – I seriously doubt it. If you love to laugh, and especially if you like those laughs to be underpinned by thrumming dread and moral turpitude, I doubt you will find a more gratifying show all year.
Enthusiasts of Am I Being Unreasonable? will know all this already, which has made the wait for its return feel interminable. Yet while two-and-a-half years have passed in reality, time has stood still in the world of the show: series one ended with Nic (Cooper) having a hallucinatory panic attack at a memorial service for her brother-in-law Alex – her flashbacks revealing that she deliberately caused his death after he rejected her. Series two opens with Nic fleeing the same scene before slinking back to the family home to check on her son Ollie (who seems fine, bar the fact that he recently killed the cat) and ask her furious husband if she can sleep on the sofa. Rejected, again, she is left with only one option: her recently acquired bestie Jen.
This is not ideal in light of what we’re about to find out: that the memorial descended into bloody chaos after Jen’s covert video of Nic confessing to the affair was broadcast to the congregation. Clearly, Jen – played by Hizli with a cool mateyness, designed to mask the desperation this anxiously attached, poverty-stricken single parent is consumed by – is not the person Nic thought she was. But she has no one else, so the pair shack up. What follows is a rollercoaster of psychedelic paranoia – the show mines a sinister and surreal English folklore seam from its rural village setting – as Nic grapples with what she has done and her (justified!) suspicions about her only friend, while being haunted by the young couple who witnessed her crime.
Throughout all this heartstoppingly tense drama, the comedy comes thick and fast: the script never wastes an opportunity for wit, levity or weirdness. Every line that comes out of Cooper’s mouth and every expression that passes across her face is comic gold. As a quick-witted yet chaotic middle-class mum, Nic is worlds away from the character that brought Cooper fame – This Country’s Kerry Mucklowe, essentially a shrug in human form – but equally funny. Cooper’s timing is easily matched by Lenny Rush, who imbues Ollie with a mix of mouths-of-babes candour, steely determination and pre-teen histrionics (he has already won a Bafta for his performance).
Completing this dysfunctional family is Nic’s husband, Dan, played with masterly slipperiness by Dustin Demri-Burns, who does a great impression of a really nice guy when he’s not being a red flag-waving scumbag (he is worth keeping around as a banter partner for his wife, though; one highlight of the opening episode is an argument between the pair in which the stars and TV personalities Jason Orange, Melinda Messenger, Carol McGiffin and John McCririck are all invoked). Elsewhere, we are treated to incredible cameos from comedy stars Jamali Maddix, Phil Dunning and Tom Davis (whose exquisite turn as an unhinged cab driver deserves multiple rewinds) and a bananas guest role for Cooper’s brother and This Country co-creator Charlie.
In many ways, Am I Being Unreasonable? is a spiritual successor to Nighty Night, Julia Davis’s pitch-black 00s comedy about a narcissistic beauty therapist with blood on her hands. But though the two shows are similarly dark, the crucial difference is that Cooper and Hizli have crafted characters who are as monstrous as they are lovable and relatable. The show radiates genuine feeling in its depiction of the love between Nic and Ollie, and understands how even a profoundly flawed female friendship can be a means of survival. (Jen’s motivations are never overt, but an extended flashback does provide some context for her odd behaviour.)
I don’t want to give any spoilers, suffice to say that by the time the end credits rolled my jaw was on the floor. The plot is inordinately gripping, and there is something almost Shakespearean about its engineering; Nic and Alex’s affair sparks a domino effect of awful events that feel inevitable and unstoppable. This being a continuing TV show, however, there is neither catharsis nor resolution. I can’t predict what horrifying developments Cooper has up her sleeve for the already-commissioned third series, but it would be criminal to make us wait until 2027 to witness them.
• Am I Being Unreasonable? aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer in the UK and on SBS in Australia.
