For Hulu's Such Brave Girls, There's No Such Thing as Overcoming Trauma

Over the past few years, one theme has dominated pop culture: trauma. Whether characters are just starting to come to terms with their trauma — as was the case in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You — grappling with it decades later (Jamie Lee Curtis' recent Halloween trilogy), or using it as a tool for good (freshman NBC drama Found), the film and TV landscape is filled with stories about people processing their emotional baggage and upsetting experiences in real time, with varying degrees of professional help.

Such Brave Girls, a British sitcom now streaming on Hulu in the United States, is similarly focused on the various ways in which single mother Deb (Louise Brealey) and her daughters Josie (creator Kat Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson) have been damaged by their father's abandonment. (A decade prior, he went to the store in search of tea bags and never returned.) But if other shows of this ilk push their characters to overcome their trauma — almost always by addressing it head-on — Sadler's comedy keeps the Johnson women mired in it. Even as the six-episode season progresses, Deb, Josie, and Billie remain defined by the past: They allow their festering feelings of betrayal and blame to rule their lives, as they've convinced themselves that an unhappy existence is better than one that requires any degree of honesty or vulnerability.

Of the three, Josie is the most defeatist in her worldview. The premiere reveals that Josie was recently treated for depression and suicidal ideation, a storyline that arose out of Sadler's "complete mental health crash" early in the pandemic, but Such Brave Girls never suggests that she's come out the other side stronger. Rather, she's decided it's easier to let her mental illness consume her, so as to avoid any sort of introspection or mean comments from her mother about why it's selfish to "drag everyone into [her] vortex of misery."

Josie, who is gay (although Deb refuses to acknowledge her identity, insisting she's only queer "for now"), is so committed to tamping down her "big feelings" that she carries on a relationship with her clingy boyfriend Seb (Freddie Meredith). "With you, my heart is quiet, like numb," she tells him. "It feels really nice. You make me feel numb."

If Josie subscribes to the "I do not wish to be perceived" school of thought, her younger sister Billie is the opposite. Billie lives in a world of delusion: Her slacker boyfriend Nicky (Sam Buchanan) hardly gives her the time of day, but Billie is so confident he's the love of her life that she goes to extreme lengths to win his affection, including sending dozens of texts threatening to "kill [her]self" if he doesn't reply. (She follows those messages up by writing, "This is a paramedic, Billie was found dead at the scene from heartbreak.") When Billie learns she's pregnant, she sees it not as a problem, but as an opportunity to "lock down" Nicky for 18 years, the very opposite of the message Deb, who explains she was "trapped" once she had Josie, is trying to impart in the moment.

The coping mechanisms Josie and Billie employ in their day-to-day lives come directly from their mother, who hides from the truth in her own way. Deb was left with a mound of debt when her husband took off, but when she meets Dev (Paul Bazely), an iPad-obsessed widower with a "massive house," she believes he could be their ticket to a better life, provided her daughters can "be normal" around him.

When they inevitably fail at that challenge, Deb is unsparing in her criticism: She claims Josie's sad face is preventing Dev from getting an erection, and thus threatening their financial future, and tells Billie that the news of her abortion (a moment that's handled matter-of-factly, as befits the show's unflinching tone) is too much for her "delicate, sensitive" beau. "For f*ck's sake. Look at yourselves," Deb tells her daughters, after Billie attempts to drown herself in response to Nicky's latest betrayal. "Josie thinks she's gay, and you just tried to kill yourself with a toilet. You both need to grow up."

Deb's total lack of support for her daughters intensifies the show's already bleak perspective. It's one thing to confront years worth of trauma with the help of a strong support system; it's another to do it while your mother makes nasty remarks about your "episodes" and insists "a stable, male figure" is "the solution to your mental health problems."

But despite all the narcissism and nihilism swirling around the Johnson house, Such Brave Girls finds great humor in its characters' failings. Sadler takes their mental unraveling seriously, while still inviting viewers to laugh at the absurdity of their behavior: Billie's unhinged texts to Nicky, Josie's urgent need for her pain to be validated by others, Deb's desperate attempt to keep Dev interested by weaving an elaborate tale of her husband's death by chicken finger. By the time the finale rolls around, they've hardly grown at all, but in the context of this pitch-black comedy, it makes perfect sense. As Billie wisely tells her sister, "Trauma's all we've got" — and ignoring that reality in favor of a more triumphant or uplifting ending would fail to honor just how far these women have to go before they can even start the healing process.

Such Brave Girls is streaming on Hulu.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.