The Lovers puts a big question to its audience, and how you respond is likely to determine whether you find this spiky romcom wonkily charming or amoral and grating. A mildly famous man meets a distinctly not famous woman, but don’t mistake this for Starstruck, because its tone is far more abrasive. It tries to find out whether it is possible for an audience to root for two people to have an affair, even if one of them has a perfectly nice-seeming girlfriend.
Johnny Flynn is Seamus O’Hannigan, a radio presenter making the move into TV when he is given his own Sunday Politics-esque show. The catch is that it will be filmed in Belfast, rather than in London, where he lives, because the studio is under pressure to produce more regional programming. His mother is Irish, so it will be a chance for him to “get back in touch with me roots,” he jokes, in a terrible accent. While in Belfast, through a series of very contrived events, he meets Janet (Roisin Gallagher), who works at a supermarket. Janet’s husband has just left her and she is so miserable that she plans to kill herself that very night. Naturally, fate, and Seamus, intervene, and this odd couple begin to fall for each other.
Flynn and Gallagher do have good chemistry. Janet is foul-mouthed, cynical and knows nothing about Seamus’s life as a minor celebrity. She is having a terrible time at work, where her boss gently chastises her for swearing, stealing and lateness. Seamus is so self-involved that he prefers Twitter to sex with his girlfriend and mistakes his new producer for a fan, dismissing her with a selfie. After an encounter with some “rather unsavoury characters” in Belfast, ie a gang of kids who object to a glib, Wikipedia-inspired, Troubles-referencing TV segment, Seamus gets stuck at Janet’s house for the night. They snipe at each other with all the gusto of a Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie, if not the passion. As she pricks his ego, and he cracks her hard shell, sparks begin to fly.
The Lovers’ lack of sentimentality is very enjoyable. At times, it feels like a grownup entry to a genre that can seem whimsical and even fantastical. While there are plenty of coincidences that will have you thinking “really?”, it just about gets away with it, because the dialogue is pleasingly barbed. Seamus and Janet are talking about lust, then love, or at least they’re pretending it has arrived in that order for them. There’s plenty of pointed hand-brushing and looking longingly into each other’s eyes, but they are frank about the fact that what they are planning to do is have a “convenient” affair. One of the conditions Janet sets is that they don’t fall in love. You don’t have to have seen many romcoms before to know where this is heading.
If this is a romcom, though, it sits in that very contemporary tonal middle ground where drama and comedy are given equal billing, and neither quite gets to shine. It’s a rom, with occasional com. The politics of Northern Ireland are dropped in every now and then, without much evenness, though it does make a firm point, when the pair are on a picturesque night out walking through the city, that it’s only ever the murals that are seen on the news.
Janet is much more likable than Seamus, but less developed as a character. She is in the depths of despair when we meet her, and her colleagues allude to mental health issues, but as soon as she meets a bumbling English fool, she’s practically right as rain. I know depression doesn’t always make for the funniest gags, but it does seem to brush that aspect aside rather quickly, at least in the early episodes. And Seamus does have a partner, Frankie (Alice Eve), who seems very pleasant. It’s a big hill to climb. “I think the problem is, neither of us have had an affair before,” says Janet, as if that makes it any more palatable.
The pairing of Flynn and Gallagher works well enough, though, that I do end up wanting the Lovers to make it work, if only because Janet deflates Seamus’s ego on a regular basis, which is satisfying to watch. But I don’t feel particularly good about it, and surely most of the pleasure to be had from a romcom is to get behind the central pairing, all the way.
The Lovers is on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK and Binge in Australia.
