Nancy Harris’s The Dry (RTÉ One, 10.15pm) had an inauspicious beginning in 2022 as a comedy about a family of Irish alcoholics made for Britain’s Britbox streaming service. So far, so pandering. However, as the series returns for a third and final season, it has outgrown its desire to cater to the British gaze and has found its groove as an earnestly funny dramedy about middle-class Dubliners stumbling through life in a haze of dysfunction.
The excellent Róisín Gallagher is back as Siobhán, an arts lecturer who has overcome a ruinous relationship with wine and is trying to conquer her equally destructive connection with horrific ex, Jack (Moe Dunford).
Awkwardly, he has been parachuted into her NCAD-esque college, where he is smugly lecturing on the evils of toxic masculinity to his mesmerised students. Dunford is brilliantly smug and slithery as the despicable Jack, one of those fake bohos who always seem to come out on top in Ireland, no matter that their villainy is plain to see.
Siobhán’s a mess – but so too are her parents, Bernie (Pom Boyd) and Tom (Ciarán Hinds), who have separated following Tom’s affair with a neighbour. Tom (Hinds is great as a dozy Irish dad) has embarked on a new career running a coffee stall. Bernie, meanwhile, has to cope with the arrival in her life of a figure from the past.
This comes as an unnecessary complication for the kids. Siobhán is stuck working with her ex. Her sister Caroline (Siobhán Cullen) has meanwhile cut off the father of her newborn baby (a smug banker she met on Tinder) and become engaged to boring ex Rory (Eoin Duffy), who arrives with a disapproving mother as standard.
Harris’s script is agreeably wry and impressively relentless. If one joke doesn’t land, never mind, because here comes another. The Dry also accurately captures the travails of a certain cohort of well-to-do Dubliners who don’t have to worry about property prices but have found lots of other things to be unhappy about.
Still, each 30-minute episode clips by – helped along by some genuinely compelling twists. The new addition to the cast is Rick Donald, as Australian Daryl, an out-of-towner who puts it to Siobhán that her excessive drinking wasn’t an indication of alcoholism but a response to the trauma she felt over her brother’s suicide.
That death and other tragedies and setbacks are handled sensitively, and Gallagher is great as a millennial on the brink of getting it together but who can’t quite leave her old, shambolic self behind. Having begun as a clichéd comedy about posh, drunken Dubs, The Dry has matured into something both funnier and more introspective – and it’s great fun to sit down and watch it pour another (non-alcoholic) glass of acutely observed social comedy.