Lucia Keskin is a 23-year-old actor and writer who made her name on YouTube. Under the nom de plume Chi With a C, she has garnered nearly half a million subscribers with videos variously embracing what my grandma used to call “sheer nonsense” (for instance: “pretending to be a carrot for one minute”), musical numbers and parodies of entire shows, with Keskin playing all the parts. She is a great impressionist; if Modern Family is ever rebooted, Sofía Vergara could listen to Keskin’s uncanny impersonation and immediately slip back into character.
Keskin has now written, and is starring in, her own sitcom, Things You Should Have Done. She plays Chi, a 20-year-old self-described “stay-at-home daughter”, whose parents have recently been killed in a road accident. All that was recovered from the wreckage? A ready meal, which the police solemnly hand over to her, after breaking the news that she is now an orphan. “Do you think it’s too soon to eat this?” she asks.
And we’re off – not to the races, but to Chi’s stumbling, bumbling, minimal efforts in learning to live independently. Her parents have left her the house – much to the chagrin of her mother’s uptight sister, Karen (Selin Hizli), who can, legitimately, only see disaster befalling the place with her niece in charge. (In one episode, Chi is unable to work out how to sit on a chair correctly.)
But the house is hers on the condition that she fulfils a list of tasks her parents have left for her to complete: open a bank account, learn what a clock does, show compassion for someone (anyone), make a friend, read a book, learn to drive, and so on.
After the first episode, this narrative thrust falls by the wayside, in favour of less focused plots of minor calamity. One sees Chi’s house “stopping working”, her bills lying on the mat, unpaid (“I don’t know what those brown and white squares do”). Another centres on her insistence that Pancake Day is an important family celebration; a third on her discovery of the local retirement home, where the lack of demands on its residents prompts her to move in.
Into the mix we can add Karen’s husband, Dave (Daniel Fearn), a good-hearted delivery driver and conspiracy theorist (“Joe Biden is a character played by Jim Carrey”). His favourite trips are those to the retirement home, to deliver boxes of medication. “They get such a buzz out of it,” he exclaims. “It’s almost like drugs to them!”
He and Karen have been trying unsuccessfully for a baby, despite his stellar sperm count (news of which is kept from her partly out of misguided kindness and partly out of fearing her wrath if she finds out she could be the reason for their problems). Dave already has a son, Lucas (Jamie Bisping) ,who is as sweet as his dad, but almost as ill-equipped for life as Chi. When the mother who abandoned him shows up in later episodes, you cannot help but feel for this gentle, unselfish soul. Chi, meanwhile, you could happily kick into the sea.
Things You Should Have Done has a fine cast, some good moments (Karen sleep-complaining; the enduring incomprehension of Chi and Lucas about the role of a solicitor; the seamlessly integrated parodies of Nigella) and plenty of unrealised potential on show. The death of Chi’s parents is just a device – and a potentially wasted one at that: it doesn’t make it in any way a show about grief, which might have provided more depth.
Some viewers will doubtless enjoy the surreal moments and seeing the many innovative ways in which Chi can be thick. But the show is at its best when Karen or Lucas ground it more firmly in reality – emotional or otherwise (such as people understanding how to correctly sit on chairs). At these points, Things You Should Have Done stops feeling quite so much like a loose coalition of slightly underbaked ideas.
• Things You Should Have Done aired on BBC Three and is available on BBC iPlayer
