The Fleabag effect is, thank heavens, still with us. People recoil at the term because it is usually used negatively – to suggest that the airwaves have been flooded since with derivative versions of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit. But in a more positive sense, the Fleabag effect can be said to be the one it had on TV commissioners’ minds. It proved that there was a market for intelligent, women-centred, women-led stories and an appetite for comedy dramas about as dark as you could make them.
And lo, pitches that a few years earlier might have drawn aghast looks before being chucked in the nearest bin as too challenging, too bitter, too confusing, too female were instead brought to fruition. The likes of Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up, Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon’s Back to Life and Nancy Harris’s The Dry ensued, combining meditations on poverty, mental illness, alcoholism, the ramifications of childhood and other trauma with an immoderate number of excellent jokes that are not necessarily designed to make you laugh.
Now The Dry is back for a second season. It’s now seven months after the first and Siobhan Sheridan (AKA Shiv, played by Roisin Gallagher), has a job as a receptionist at the local art college and is six months sober. So, too, is her mother Bernie (Pom Boyd), who we last saw slipping silently into her first AA meeting beside her daughter. At a subsequent meeting, she has found a boyfriend, Finbar (Michael McElhatton), and moved him into the house while husband Tom (Ciarán Hinds) is relegated to the shed. Fragile party animal Ant (Adam John Richardson) is still with Max (Emmanuel Okoye) and still has his job at the estate agency. For now. Caroline (Siobhan Cullen) is making her way through the Tinder selection box in the wake of her broken engagement to Rory (Eoin Duffy), ill-suited though she is to the practice – Rory’s mother’s opinion of her as “a spunk-soaked evil slut” notwithstanding – and to most of the men she meets. And Karen (Janet Moran) is still magnificently, brutalisingly Karen.
The four episodes available for review prove creator and writer Nancy Harris has lost none of her touch, and the new additions to the cast further strengthen that view. There is a new love interest for Shiv, Alex (Sam Keeley), who seems a much healthier choice for her than Jack (Moe Dunford) ever was. He is still around, however, but now with a baby and a custody battle to make him even more of a toxic threat to Shiv were she to get involved with him again. Which she won’t, obviously, because she has lovely Alex now and she’ll have learned from her years of previous entanglement with the man that only misery lies there. I’m sure this is how it will go.
There is investment banker Shane (Seán Doyle), who – mostly through sheer exhaustion on Caroline’s part, as she sets her sights on becoming a consultant at the hospital – becomes her appalling boyfriend. And there is the exquisitely awful Finbar, a supercilious self-described “man of letters” who insinuates himself into every family moment and is so perfectly unbearable I wish to throw every award at the actor and at Harris. I hate him so much.
Like the first series, the sequel is immaculately plotted and full of authentic detail, offering a pitiless examination of the unhappinesses we live with, the harms they make us do to ourselves and each other and the dearth of easy solutions. How much is Tom the architect of his own misfortune? Would we recognise him if we had met this broken man before his son died – when he was still a bold self-made businessman on the rise? Is it Bernie’s turn to thrive now, or is her new life with her AA pals and Finbar poisoned because she is still refusing to address any causes of her drinking? Her young sponsor Billy (Thommas Kane Byrne) advises that the “moral inventory” that is part of the recovery process is “only as hard as you make it”. There are many kinds of false friends.
The dynamics between and among any of the characters shift back and forth but there’s never a false note in them. We delve further and further into the dysfunction of the family – and of other relationships around them – without things ever becoming histrionic. The Dry remains a dense, clever, deeply sad, deeply funny achievement.
• The Dry is on ITVX.
