Over the last few years, we have found ourselves inundated with sadcoms. Again and again, we’ve been deluged by ostensible comedies that are so concerned with grief and trauma that the laughs end up feeling like a distant afterthought. Striking the right balance between comedy and drama takes absurd levels of effort and craft at the best of times. Doing it with a premise as bleak as BBC Three’s new series Just Act Normal is almost impossible.
My hands are tied with embargos, so I have to be vague about certain plot details, but Just Act Normal is a show about three young siblings who decide to struggle on as normal after their mother – a perennially unreliable woman with substance abuse issues – disappears. Their lives are suddenly spent trying to navigate the complex systems of the adult world while processing the grief of abandonment in real time. Sounds like grim stuff (Disney’s Good American Family recently tackled a similar subject in the form of full-blown melodrama), and yet there’s a palpable lightness of touch to Just Act Normal. You could almost call it joy.
