Romantic comedy is a genre powered by cliches. The meet-cute, the sassy best pals, the sparkling initial chemistry followed by unfortunate misunderstanding and sweet reconciliation: ticking them off or seeing them slyly subverted is a cosy routine. What, though, if those comforting tropes were boldly thrown in the bin? Something dark and daring might be created. Significant Other is not that show. Unmoored from those familiar structures, it’s a dispiriting catastrophe.
We meet Sam (Youssef Kerkour) in his bare Manchester flat, stuffing handfuls of painkillers down his throat. He’s lying in bed waiting for the pills to kill him when he’s interrupted by a hammering at the door: nextdoor neighbour Anna (Katherine Parkinson) is having a heart attack and has been told not to wait for the paramedics by herself. The previously unacquainted pair end up sharing an ambulance and, once they’ve survived their near-death experiences, they stay in each other’s lives.
Both are lonely souls, deeply damaged. Sam has recently run away from his broken marriage, while Anna is a fretful loner, scarred by a futile affair with an unavailable man – what she thought was a coronary might really have been heartache. Conveniently, they both, in their 40s, have zero friends or close family, leaving them free to conduct a halting courtship.
The main obstacle to them achieving loving fulfilment? It’s a pretty fundamental problem, namely: everything Sam says and does. In the scene outside the hospital where more traditional romcoms might tease the first spark of connection, Sam is clangingly, implausibly rude: “Being an attractive woman is overrated … you’re lucky!” From there, he remains deceitful and emotionally stunted, regularly taking advantage of Anna’s forgiving demeanour as he half-heartedly pursues her while pining for his estranged wife.
You expect the male lead in a modern dramedy to be a frustrating loser who never grew up, but there is a not particularly fine line between a self-destructive yet salvageable manchild and an irredeemably selfish arsehole who never learns or improves. It’s not that the scenes we expect where Sam turns out to be charming and funny beneath that maddening exterior – so that we and Anna might conceivably adore him – are bad; they’re not there, because the show is too concerned with being diffident to include them. Having tried to kill himself in the opening scene, Sam presents as manic, irrational and, on one occasion, dissociative. We’re left to flirt with the queasy prospect of Sam’s mental health issues being what softens him, as if troubled people cannot also be annoying tossers.
Kerkour is inert, understandably unsure of how to handle the role he’s been given: the sex scenes between Sam and Anna, desperate dry heaves that take place when she is at her lowest, are particularly alienating. But Parkinson is on safer ground. Brittle cynics hardened by disappointment are her stock in trade, and thankfully there is time to explore Anna via the other men in her life.
Shows like this tend to evolve into ensemble pieces in any case. But Significant Other doesn’t have the confidence to form a network of people coexisting in a believable world. Instead, every male supporting character gets one episode only, and exists purely to illustrate an aspect of Anna’s predicament – which they don’t do convincingly, because they’re not properly drawn characters, so the message they’re there to impart doesn’t land. Mark Heap is horribly wasted as a cartoonishly terrible blind date (“Do I like jazz? Yep, it’s good background music. In the car”) whose storyline is crudely guillotined as soon as it’s served its purpose; Ben Bailey Smith hardly fares better as Anna’s ex, whose rekindling of their exploitative relationship is far more brutally bleak than the writers can feasibly have intended.
Unfortunately, though, that’s the norm for a script – adapted from the Israeli series of the same name – that is riddled with first-draft ideas. Nobody’s actions, motivations or reactions make any sense. You end up doing a slow-motion hand jive as you watch, alternately pressing your fists to your chest in a cringe, then lifting your palms in an irate shrug: why did they do that? Who would do that?
The final moral is meant to be that Sam has accepted his divorce and moved on, while Anna has got over her fear of being hurt and is ready to give love one more try. But she’s not offered anything like love: unlikely contrivances have cornered her into accepting her only option, despite it being manifestly hopeless. Significant Other isn’t like other romcoms but, faced with its jarringly cold misanthropy, you won’t be willing to settle.
Significant Other is on ITVX.
