Two of the more unexpected
comic delights of 2022 will be back in my life by the end of this month. The first
came from a more unexpected source than you might think. Last January, I gave a
tentative rave to Freeform’s Single Drunk Female, an intriguing comedy
series about twenty-eight year old Samantha, who in the pilot episode ends up
being fired from her job, going to rehab, moving back in with her mother in
Boston, getting wasted after thirty days of sobriety, ending up jail and being
forced to go to AA.
My doubts about the series
had more to do with one of the key members of the production staff Jenni
Konner, most famously associated with HBO’s Girls, a series I utterly
loathed but millions loved. Samantha was more or less the same age as the leads
in that series and she initially started out as just as unlikeable and initially
very hard to imagine you could build a series on. But as Samantha began to make
an uneasy march towards her first sobriety, both she and the series continued
to grow on be a big way. Sofia Black D’Elia slowly became more appealing as she
continued to struggle through a mess of her own making, as we saw her build her
friendships with her bestie Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington steals every scene she’s
in) her complicated relationship with Brit, whose boyfriend she had crushed on
and tried to steal (and was now married to), her complicated relationship with
James, initially her sponsor who over the course of a year she became more and
more attracted to and the one solid relationship she had with her sponsor Olivia
(Rebecca Henderson)
The season finale ended
with her in the rare space of being whole and almost everyone around her broken
in someone. Brit had broken up her marriage with Joel on their wedding day, and
James had gone off the wagon hours after the two of them finally hooked up. That
she looked at him as a fellow alcoholic and not a love interest is a scar that
has not healed.
It's been six month since the
first season finale, and for a change things are going Samantha’s way. She’s
got a good job at a web magazine where she seems to be having career mobility
and she gets her first promotion at the start of the season premiere. (Because
everything comes with a cost, her desk is on top of the men’s room.) She has
been promoted to ‘greeter’ and her local AA meeting and is celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday. In typical
Samantha fashion, her birthday is a disaster. Naturally her mother (we will get
back to her trust me) does everything she can to humiliate her on the day of
her birthday. Everybody gives her a journal as a birthday present. James
reappears at her first meeting as an AA greeter and she invites him to her party
to try to rebuild her relationship within him even though they haven’t spoken
in six months. James gives her a whisky glass from the bare they met at, and
then tries to kiss her. It’s hardly a surprise Samantha ends up in her closet
before the party’s over.
Things only get negligibly
better in the next episode when her new boss turns out to be Nathaniel, who she
managed to get fired from her last job in the midst of a drunken rage. She
immediately quits her job to protect her sobriety, which Olivia admonishes and
her mother uses the words to say: “You’ve made the right choice” in the way
that you do when you want to tell someone you’ve screwed up. Naturally she goes
back to her job and is put in an even awkward situation, and then comes back to
thank Olivia – who then tells her that she’s about to move and can no longer be
her sponsor. Olivia has been Samantha’s rock through all this and she doesn’t
know how to move forward: the last scene of the second episode is her trying to
tearfully sing her favorite song in the same closet she hid in the previous
episode.
Felicia is actually doing
better and continues to be hysterical; she is now progressing in her
relationship to the first point that she agonizes over a celebratory gift. (One
of her friends at the salon she works at suggested oral sex, which definitely would
have been better than the chose she made.) Brit has spent the last six months
since her marriage ended refusing to actually divorce her husband or even tell
her parents, something that Joel keeps telling her to do, to the point that he
finally forces her hand at a lunch with her parents. Joel is justifiably
unremorseful in this, and Brit who was one of the most sympathetic characters
in Season 1 is starting to look bad.
Of course the character
who you can never look away from is Samantha’s mother because she’s Ally Sheedy.
Carol Fink is the kind of obdurate woman who genuinely thinks she has to be the
center of everything and sees her daughter’s failings as a reflection on her
and successes that she has never earned.
We want to be sympathetic to Carol – her husband has died of cancer a few years
ago, her daughter is going through major struggles – but every time Carol’s in
the room, you’re amazed that Samantha only became an alcoholic. The fact
that in addition to this she seems to have lapped her daughter – she now has a
serious boyfriend (Ian Gomez, adding yet another memorable sad sack to his
resume) and is now just as likely to be a shoulder to cry on as her daughter is
– is another one of the long list of grudges that Samantha has been carrying her
whole life. When she announces to a group of seriously bored prisoners that “my
life’s not perfect, I still live with my mom” it’s a big laugh not only because
we know who Carol is but because we know if the situation were reversed, Samantha
would have no problem leaving Carol to stew in prison. This is a funny series in
its own right, but Sheedy’s presence truly elevates and I can’t wait until
Molly Ringwald, her old Breakfast Club school mate, comes to guest star
as has been promised.
Not even I would dare rank
Single Drunk Female among the great comedies on television today; shows
like Abbott Elementary and The Bear, whose characters are from
the closest echelon of working class citizens are light years above it in
quality. But the series demonstrates yet again what a great utility player
Freeform can be when it comes to superb television if you know where to find
it. With its signature comedy grown-ish about to end its run, this is
the kind of series that could well take its place as a flagship show for a
network that may be the best single source for female led series overall since Lifetime
abandoned the field several years ago. And in all honesty, by the time it did,
the kind of solid female shows that made the network superb – Any Day Now and
Army Wives – had long been abandoned for kind of over-the-top series
that still populate its movies. Single Drunk Female might very well be
the title of a Lifetime movie someday, but there’s no way it could be as funny,
entertaining or grounded as what Samantha is living through right now.
My score: 4.5 stars.
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