Getting up to pee in the night, consolidating your pension plans, squinting at the cinema screen: there are many signs that you’re getting older. The realisation that millennials are no longer a generation of feckless whiners, as depicted in Lena Dunham’s Girls, but a cohort on the cusp of middle age, is another one. This is the milieu of Sky Comedy’s Smothered, a romcom set, not on the dancefloor of youth, but after the lights come up.
Sammy (Danielle Vitalis) is an interior design assistant on the cusp of proper adulthood. “I just want a bit of f***ing romance, you know?” she tells a stranger at an orgy. But when that romance arrives, in the form of square-jawed normie Tom (Jon Pointing), she’s hesitant. Where she’s chaotic, impulsive, and struggling to get her life in order, Tom is a real, bona fide grown-up. He has a boring office job (his colleagues call him “a sad husk”), a house in Blackheath and a twist you’ll see coming from the off. What starts as a three-week dalliance (“An affair,” Sammy decides, “like a real one from the past”) turns into something more lasting – and more complicated.
There has been something of a renaissance of the television romcom recently. Rose Matafeo’s Starstruck ran for three series on the BBC, while Aussie hit Colin from Accounts was one of the best shows of the year. Even Everything I Know About Love, adapted from Dolly Alderton’s bestselling memoir, profitably mined several decades of romantic comedy tropes. Smothered is perhaps the most traditional of all of them. A classic chalk (sexy, gacky chalk) and cheese (bland, structural cheese) adventure played out across the telegenic residential roads and brunch spots of London. Richard Curtis, the godfather of the genre, is referenced directly.
As with the plot, there are more than a few bumps in the road. Leads Vitalis and Pointing don’t have immediate chemistry, and – though it may be a function of my age more than anything – the conflict feels lopsided. Tom indulges a normal amount of responsibility; Sammy is a selfish whirlwind of immaturity. Naturally, they learn a little something from one another, but it feels like she has a lot more to learn. But writer Monica Heisey (who has previously worked on Schitt’s Creek and Workin’ Moms) has a good ear for the follies of modern dating and the foibles of modern relationships. Supporting roles played by the likes of Aisling Bea, as a juice-chugging restaurateur, and Harry Trevaldwyn, as Tom’s snarky co-worker, provide welcome comic chops.
Distributed by Sky in bite-sized 20-minute chunks, Smothered feels designed to be consumed as a snack, rather than a meal. In situation comedy terms, this is much less situation dependent (after all, they graduate quickly from a situationship to a relationship: “I am mature,” Sammy announces defiantly, “I’m a taxpayer!”). That central relationship might be teaming with potential friction points – race, class, socio-economics – but instead, the show focuses on the muddle of two very different people trying to get along in a confusing world. At its best, it feels zeitgeisty – horny dads playing Mario Kart, or a superb Jay Rayner cameo – without being cloying. And like romance in the real world, it grows on you, gets stronger as the narrative progresses.
“I’m doomed to be a successful businesswoman,” Sammy announces, ruefully, at the start of the series, “with an amazing personality and a perfect arse, but no love.” Can she have it all, the Holy quad-factor of job, friends, bum and romance? Like all good romcoms, Smothered makes it seem, simultaneously, both impossible and inevitable. Perhaps that’s the trick of relationships: to make compatible the incompatible, and turn the extraordinary complexity of the everyday into something effortless.
