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.
