The romcom is as indestructible as a cockroach: a thousand reports of its impending demise have been matched by a thousand reports of its sudden resurgence. At this stage, it’s safe to say the genre will outlive us all. That’s partly because the romantic comedy is powered by a problem that will never be resolved: the glorious headache that is falling in love.
Smothered, the riotous new show from bestselling author and Schitt’s Creek writer Monica Heisey, takes this eternal affliction and tangles it up with a very modern complication.
Things begin traditionally enough: Tom (boy) meets Sammy (girl) and, after the requisite period of dithering, the pair fall head over heels in love. And then Sammy discovers that Tom loves someone else more than he will ever love her. That someone is Ellie, his six-year-old daughter.
Smothered could have created a compelling drama mined from all this knotty emotional complexity. Instead, Heisey and her team have moulded it into an irreverent comedy full of fast-paced farce and sparkling dialogue. Funny, fun-loving 26-year-old Sammy – played with madcap motormouth energy by Danielle Vitalis (Attack the Block, The Great Escaper) – initially seems an unlikely match for Tom (Jon Pointing, last seen in Big Boys), a wet wipe-carrying thirtysomething ground down by fatherhood. (“I don’t think I’ve had a treat in about six years,” he tells Sammy dolefully during their first encounter; when he finally does get to have a big night out, he is forced to flee the club half-cut to deal with a vomit-based childcare emergency.) But in true romcom tradition, those flying sparks mean the pair’s differences eventually go up in smoke. All that remains is the little-girl-shaped stumbling block that forces the pair to press pause – or fast-forward – on their feelings.
Like every romantic comedy ever made, Smothered’s success hinges on a particular science: good chemistry between the lead actors. Vitalis was an early shoo-in for Sammy, although she didn’t realise it at first: “They didn’t tell me that I had the part!”, she recalls. Subsequently she read with “12, maybe 13” different Toms. As for Pointing, after his auditionhe gave up all hope of landing the role. “I didn’t hear anything for ages. A month later my mate was like, ‘Can you give me a hand with this audition?’ And it was the script [for Smothered]. I was like: OK, I’ve not got that then. And I went round his house and helped him with my part.”
Did Vitalis feel Pointing was the standout choice to play her love interest? “What can she say to that?!” interrupts Pointing. (Fair point.) It turns out, however, that it wasn’t the audition itself that sealed the deal, but the moment just before, when Vitalis found Pointing watching This Morning in the waiting room and the pair struck up a conversation about a viewer’s noise pollution problem. “And that was it from there,” says Vitalis. “We had quite a natural banter with each other just as people.”
That banter – relentless, effervescent, teasingly combative – is also what rocket-powers Smothered itself, a show that combines giddy, heart-eyed rom with hectic, biting com to enchanting effect. Tom is the straight man, a quietly thrilled and occasionally deadpan foil for Sammy, a filterless font of cheeky charm, indignant rage and really good jokes. Scarred by a stream of bad dating experiences, she initially insists the pair embark on a short-lived affair, “like a real one, from the past – no last names, no details, at the end we just walk in different directions on a bridge or something”. Their brief dalliance does not conclude in such a suave and dignified manner, but it slowly flowers into a real, meaningful and gratifyingly imperfect bond.
But before all that, the show indulges in some old-school rom-com mechanics. Londoners Sammy and Tom’s paths initially cross when they strike up a conversation at a karaoke bar. Heisey was keen to embrace that old-school dramatic device – “it would have been a bit of a shame to have them swiping on each other” – yet soon realised that our app-driven dating culture had bestowed the “meet cute” cliche with a kind of fairytale quality. “Meeting someone in the wild and having it work out is increasingly fantastical for a lot of people,” says Heisey. “The big fantasy is: a man talks to you at a bar and you’re excited about it!”
Sammy and Tom’s relationship may begin dreamily, but it quickly smashes into cold, hard reality when they attempt to refashion themselves as a blended family. Like many prospective stepchildren, Tom’s daughter, Ellie, is not at all happy when Sammy comes on the scene. Did the team ever worry about treating her trauma too flippantly? Vitalis thinks “one of the best ways to deal with serious subjects is through comedy”, while Heisey says that a certain glibness was partly the point: “Sammy is our way into the story and she feels quite flippant about it, so the journey of season one is Sammy realising that she can’t quite joke away the problem of this kid.”
Pointing, for his part, was delighted to discover Tom was a father. The actor doesn’t have children of his own and was excited to be “leaning into the ‘practical dad’ role – windbreaker, school bag, you know”. Over the past few years, Pointing has carved out a niche in British comedy with his superlative line in hyperactive himbos with hidden depths (see his excellent work on Channel 4’s Big Boys and the criminally underrated BBC Three YouTuber satire Pls Like). Yet, at 36, he relished the chance to become what he refers to as “Mr Serious”. Vitalis – who will only say she is in her 30s – was also glad of the opportunity to play an adult. “Often we get young people that are maybe in the education system and so it was nice to feel like I’m every woman.”
Despite growing up in Toronto, Heisey – who is now UK-based – says she has always been enamoured by the British romcom, from the Richard Curtis classics (Smothered is punctuated by a recurring reference to Love Actually) to recent TV takes such as Catastrophe and Starstruck. For Heisey, the appeal of British comedy is that “so much of it is about what’s not being said”. Pair that with our “endlessly fascinating and strange” dating culture, and you get a romcom tradition that is not about “the big speeches or people who are really turning on the flirt – it’s people struggling towards expressing that they care about each other”.
The team also took inspiration from the hit American movies of the 80s and 90s that did so much to warp millennial expectations of love. Before filming commenced, Heisey invited Vitalis and Pointing over to watch her favourite film of all time, When Harry Met Sally. “We got pizza and we loved all the jumpers in the movie and we were like: this is the vibe – we just want loads of jumpers,” recalls Vitalis (she did end up wearing some nice jumpers). For Heisey, the movie “perfectly captures what a great romcom has, which is that watching it feels the same way that the world feels when you’re falling in love: everything is 15% more charming and 15% more beautiful and 15% more colourful, and that was what I was hoping we could go for with Smothered as well.” Heisey has undoubtedly succeeded in her goal: as the backdrop to Sammy and Tom’s captivatingly chaotic courtship, south-east London has never looked more beautiful.
Tempering the glowing sentimentality of US romcoms with British reticence and realism was one of the big challenges of making the show – but it’s also an everyday struggle for Heisey. “As a North American expat in the UK, I think finding the right level of sentiment to not alienate yourself from your friends and loved ones is crucial,” she says with a smile.
The team found themselves bringing things back down to earth in an aesthetic sense, too. When Heisey visited the set of Sammy’s “too nice” house share, she requested the walls be painted to look damp and the radiators adorned with drying pants (“we didn’t want it to be like Bridget Jones’s Diary where she lives in Borough Market on a publishing salary by herself”). Sammy works as an assistant to an interior designer, which is the perfect romcom job: adjacent to luxury and glamour, without being drenched in it. Tom is not so lucky. “I got demoted several times,” says Pointing. “The first time I read the script, he was a lawyer. By the time we’re shooting, he works for a supermarket magazine. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t give lawyer?”
One upside of his demotion is that Tom gets some cracking colleagues: flamboyant Jordan, played by the Instagram-famous character comedian Harry Trevaldwyn, and straight-talking Mims (Tessa Wong). On Sammy’s side of the obligatory romcom friendship divide, we have her housemates, the chilled AJ (Amber Grappy) and Farrah, an incredibly funny and slightly terrifying turn by Rebecca Lucy Taylor, AKA the musician Self Esteem. Sammy is also working for swaggering, sharp-tongued restaurateur Gillian (a brilliant performance from the comedian Aisling Bea).
As it turns out, Gillian has a bigger role in the series than you might initially imagine, a twist that genuinely caught me off guard (Heisey looks delighted when I tell her this). It’s not the only pleasingly unexpected aspect of this bracingly contemporary spin on a classic genre: for all its embrace of the cosy tropes and cosy jumpers, Smothered is proof the romcom can still surprise us, even after all these years.
• Smothered is on Sky Comedy and Now.
