The second part of the title of Camilla Whitehill\u2019s Channel 4 comedy drama is a reference to mood disorders. Bipolar, to be exact \u2013 the condition her protagonist Maggie has been diagnosed with. The first part is a reference to pretty much everything else. Big Mood tackles big topics and chases big laughs. There are big adventures, big gestures and big cameos. It\u2019s undeniably ambitious, but does all this add up to something truly meaningful? It can be difficult to tell.<\/p>\n
Series one introduced Maggie in the midst of a manic episode: she had pestered her alma mater to let her deliver a speech in the hope of seducing her old history teacher. That quickly gave way to a depressive one, during which she attended her 30th birthday party unshowered and on the verge of tears. The reason for this rollercoaster was Maggie\u2019s decision to stop taking her medication; she believed it was impeding her creative capabilities and her career as a playwright. Eventually, she agreed to go back on lithium, only to experience terrifying hallucinations and confusion \u2013 she\u2019d been poisoned by an erroneous prescription filled out by an overwhelmed psychiatrist.<\/p>\n
As a portrayal of bipolar, Big Mood was hugely insightful and nuanced; Maggie\u2019s inner hell was externalised flawlessly by Bridgerton and Derry Girls star Nicola Coughlan. Yet it was immediately clear that the show\u2019s interests were divided. It wanted to be realistic and heartfelt, but also thigh-slappingly hilarious. It\u2019s always heartening to see art that\u2019s alive to the absurdity of mental illness without minimising it, but I have to admit Big Mood\u2019s combination of wacky sitcom contrivances, self-conscious quirk and tasteless Fleabagian humour left me cold.<\/p>\n
Then there was Big Mood\u2019s other major preoccupation: the bond between Maggie and her best pal Eddie (It\u2019s a Sin\u2019s Lydia West). The intensity of the pair\u2019s dynamic seemed a tad unrealistic considering their age, although it did ask compelling questions about the nature of friendship. Eddie was becoming resentful of the unbalanced nature of their support system, and when she finally had some serious problems of her own, she felt her best friend had deserted her. Maggie had a legitimate excuse: she was experiencing bouts of unconsciousness and being taunted by imaginary demonic kids. But Eddie didn\u2019t know that, and fled east London for California without so much as a goodbye.<\/p>\n
Now Big Mood is back \u2013 or at least Maggie is. Having recovered from the lithium poisoning, she is now in her \u201cstable girl era\u201d; a retinol and Hello Fresh user with a six-stage morning routine codified in her notes app. Yet she\u2019s still pining after Eddie, who has been incommunicado for the past year. The wedding of a mutual friend teases the possibility of reconciliation, and as Maggie waits for her erstwhile bestie to arrive she\u2019s distracted by a ludicrously militant maid of honour, a Florence Nightingale-inspired bridesmaid dress and the hunt for the bride\u2019s secret husband who has arrived to extort the happy couple. But once these minor japes have concluded, the major intrigue begins: Eddie has returned under the thumb of a wellness guru called Whitney, who has already taken all her money and now wants to obliterate the last remnants of Eddie and Maggie\u2019s relationship.<\/p>\n
In other words, Big Mood is no longer about mood disorders. Maggie stays on a relatively even keel despite a distressing encounter with her estranged dad, an iconic Mancunian comedian and total arsehole (a very convincing Robert Lindsay). Instead, we get knockabout farce layered on top of a painstaking dissection of Eddie and Maggie\u2019s series one rift. In an effort to reconcile, Maggie becomes fixated on proving that Whitney is a scammer, even teaming up with Eddie\u2019s friend Will \u2013 an incorrigible nice guy who both women treat with utter contempt in a way that is genuinely upsetting \u2013 to comprehensively rumble her.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not an easy storyline to invest in. As a character, Eddie originally seemed smart, cynical and allergic to bullshit: her falling for Whitney\u2019s grift doesn\u2019t really track. And despite Coughlan\u2019s empathetic performance, Maggie is still destructive enough to justify Eddie\u2019s initial decision to cut ties.<\/p>\n
Of course, humour is subjective and so is charm: if you\u2019re liable to get swept up in the messy millennial-ness of it all, these will seem like quibbles. And it\u2019s true that the broad-strokes comedy does occasionally give way to substantial dramatic insight. But while Eddie and Maggie\u2019s platonic romance may have been intoxicating in their youth, now it just seems toxic. Perhaps it\u2019s time for everyone involved in this dysfunctional friendship to move on.<\/p>\n
Big Mood is on Channel 4 in the UK now. It is streaming on Stan in Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The second part of the title of Camilla Whitehill\u2019s Channel 4 comedy drama is a reference to mood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-535644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}