{"id":5177,"date":"2026-01-09T02:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/?p=5177"},"modified":"2026-01-09T02:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:27:10","slug":"such-brave-girls-is-british-tvs-most-viciously-funny-delight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/?p=5177","title":{"rendered":"Such Brave Girls Is British TV\u2019s Most Viciously Funny Delight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After devouring the first season in a matter of days, I moved on to Season 2, which dropped in July. It continues in an equally vicious, vulgar mode. (Well, on the surface at least.) Sure, the family members are all up to their usual hijinks: Josie is kidnapped by her mother at art college and marched to a surprise wedding with her deadbeat boyfriend Seb, then tries to get herself institutionalized to escape him; Billie enters into a tumultuous \u201csugar baby\u201d relationship with the much-older Graham; and Deb is desperately trying to claw her way back into Dev\u2019s favor after he discovers she lied about her ex-husband dying. Along the way, all of them continue to use self-help buzzwords and weaponized therapy speak to justify being terrible people. (There\u2019s a memorable scene in which Billie develops a thesis that being a mistress is somehow feminist.)<\/p>\n

And yet, Such Brave Girls<\/em> isn\u2019t quite as misanthropic as I might be making it sound. You can\u2019t help but root for Josie, especially as she tries to spread her wings in Season 2, exploring her creative passions and her sexuality even while remaining the perpetual family punching bag. And you can\u2019t help feeling a little sorry for Billie, whose endless quest for validation from disinterested men is undoubtedly a result of her upbringing, as we watch her mother continue to stomp all over her daughters to secure herself a financial life raft. Even Deb is the victim of a very British strain of class anxiety\u2014not only trying to survive, but trying to deflect the shame of being a poor single mother in a society that hates poor single mothers.<\/p>\n

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\"Image<\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n

Photo: Courtesy of Hulu<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

And, of course, there\u2019s the beating heart of the thing: the loyalty and genuine care the two sisters share for one another, even if it\u2019s a bond forged by trauma, and often expressed in the most toxic and destructive of ways. So, yes, I encourage anyone with a taste for gallows humor to try this delicious poisoned pudding of a show over the holiday break. And if you find it all too unrelentingly bleak? You can always take a leaf out of the Johnson family playbook and ignore, repress, forget.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After devouring the first season in a matter of days, I moved on to Season…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[235],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}