Big Mood, Channel 4, review: kooky bipolar comedy struggles to raise a chuckle (original) (raw)

It takes a little while for Big Mood, Channel 4’s new comedy, to find its feet. In fact, it takes most of its six half hours. That’s probably too much for it to be considered a success, or for already bloated TV watchers to want to bother, but then the show should probably be allowed some leeway, given what it’s trying to do.

The “Mood” of the title refers to Maggie’s (Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan) bipolar disorder. She’s a fledgling playwright about to turn 30 who’s almost entirely reliant on the support of her best friend Eddie (It’s a Sin’s Lydia West) to get her through the day.

Eddie runs a London dive bar left to her by her dad that’s almost always empty. Maggie’s goal is to get herself back on the level so she can both write and live. Eddie’s is to hold on to the bar, but mainly she’s a prop for the flailing Maggie. Their relationship is pinned by Eddie at the end of episode one: “I fix problems and you have them.”

Trying to make Maggie’s problems the stuff of comedy is itself a problem for writer Camilla Whitehill. It’s not immediately obvious if the material is just not funny (and of course one person’s side-splitting can be another’s tumbleweed), or if bipolar disorder repudiates humour itself – the scenes where Maggie is depressed and glued to her sofa, not wanting to move or speak, would give any dramatist difficulties.

As such we’re in a strange world here that should feel new but doesn’t. The “best friend who has a bar and is always there and then you fall out and then you fall back in again” trope runs through sitcom from Cheers to Fleabag. It’s been done.

That wouldn’t matter if Big Mood was as scabrous and daring as last year’s Such Brave Girls, or as funny as We Are Lady Parts, but it isn’t. Being “The Bipolar Comedy” is a good pitch on which Big Mood doesn’t deliver. Relying on two very good actors to conjure up a kooky friendship that we want to watch for three hours is asking a lot. At least it is initially.

When Big Mood shifts into a minor key, however, around episode five, stops searching for the laughs and hurls itself headlong into Maggie’s lithium abyss, it becomes something more interesting. (It’s also funnier.) Coughlan, here, is superb, and Whitehill finally has the courage to eschew the obvious and do something with her besties that Friends wouldn’t: the final episode is by some way the strongest. The question is, will you watch that far?

All episodes of Big Mood are available now at Channel4.com