‘Such Brave Girls’ Wants To Trauma Bond With You

If there’s a line that sums up Such Brave Girls, it might be this one: “Remember the family crest: Ignore, Repress, Forget.” The extremely British show, now in its second season on Hulu, isn’t one to let subtlety get in the way of its satire.

Such Brave Girls follows the all-girl Johnson family in the aftermath of the man of the house abandoning them after popping out for some tea bags. There’s single mom Deb (Louise Brealey), left in debt, who can’t stand her cheap, moronic boyfriend but suffers through it with an eye on his huge house. There’s older sister Josie (show creator Kat Sadler) who is a lesbian with a case of clinical depression/anxiety and a simpering, actively oblivious boyfriend. And there’s younger, hyper-femme sister Billie (Lizzie Davidson), the real-life sister of Sadler and an unhinged highlight, who is chasing after her own useless drug-dealing boyfriend. “Ultimately the show is a family sitcom about trauma,” Sadler has said, “but it’s more about us being narcissistic losers who are pathetically obsessed with what people think about us.” The second season opens with Josie in an art theory lecture as her mother and sister burst in, throw a hood over her head, and abduct her, only to remove the hood when they arrive at … her wedding day. “This is the happiest day of your life, Josie,” her mother says, holding up a white dress like it’s a threat.

At first I didn’t quite know what to make of a show that seemed so swift, so acidically ridiculous. Everything in Such Brave Girls is so extreme, it’s easy to take it as merely a glib string of jokes on internalized misogyny. “I guess we just have to remember that most people aren’t wet for trauma like we are,” Josie says, to which Billie responds, “But trauma’s all we’ve got.” The second season doesn’t slow down: Billie threatens to kill herself after her boyfriend expresses interest in a woman who is basically her twin (“Wash the blade first,” Josie suggests) and then blackmails the reluctant husband of a neurosurgeon into being her sugar daddy, insisting she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. The whole thing seemed to be riffing on a particular kind of holdover chauvinism. Such Brave Girls is almost unbearably maximalist, but somehow that seems to be the ideal register in which to underscore its feminist point. “This is what a feminist looks like!” Billie shouts in a later scenebefore sloppily making out with her ex-boyfriend’s ex.

Such Brave Girls it turns out is a funny, glaring reminder of how far we haven’t come. It’s a fleet, silly show, but it arrives at a time of increasingly narrowing freedoms for everyone. The show is unabashed about making its arguments: Marrying a man continues to look like a woman’s best option in a culture in which women are both overlooked and underpaid in the workforce and still expected to carry most of the weight of bringing up a family; a woman with mental illness can sometimes feel better stuck in an institution than stuck in her own life; an angry little spitfire can still be compelled to find her self worth in worthless men. When Billie asks her sister if it’s bad she’s having an affair, her sister says, “It’s the most feminist thing you can do.” It’s a joke, but is it? Sadler has made a show which viciously exposes how women have been increasingly encouraged to reconfigure themselves into regressive roles. At the very least, the gains that have been made mean that a writer like her can recognize this retro-conservatism with crystal clarity, and neon-sign it in the form of a show about three women leaning into that mess.

The idea for Such Brave Girls dates back to 2020, when Sadler and her sister were bonding over the difficult start to the pandemic. “Difficult” is an understatement: Sadler was hospitalized after trying to take her life twice, and Davidson was 20,000 pounds in debt. They both laughed about it. “We’re not serious people, so even the attempt to be serious on the phone telling each other what had gone on, we just couldn’t do it,” Sadler told The Guardian, as Davidson added: “We always find the absurdity in everything—that’s our coping mechanism.”

While the show that came out of this is hyperbolic to the nth degree, its core is real. Davidson also seeks validation from men, and Sadler, who is queer, is particularly tickled by her mother’s generation’s marriage to feminine signifiers like shaving your legs. Sadler told The Independent that while making the first season, executives pressured her to make the Johnson family more “likable.” But neither she nor director Simon Bird listened. They were inspired by shows like Pulling, Peep Show, and I Think You Should Leave. After the first season won a BAFTA for Best Scripted Comedy last May, the second season had more leeway to go even harder. “I think that I can talk about stuff and make jokes about it because it doesn’t feel like it’s punching down for me because it is from my world,” Sadler said in The Times. “It takes the sting out of all that stuff for me.”

At the end of the first season, the Johnson sisters discover their father did in fact show up to a funeral where they were hoping to confront him. An oblivious Dev—Deb’s clueless boyfriend to whom she lied that her husband was dead—bumps into him in a nearby pub. It turns out the dad never went in because he was scared of seeing his kids. “Are we scary?” an incredulous Billie asks Josie. “I think we might be a bit, yah,” Josie says, to which Billie replies with a devilish grin: “Good.”