Emma Moran's one series so far takes the superhero and makes it a flatmate: in her London everyone has a power and nobody is any better for it. She writes jokes well and plots less well, and the first is the rarer gift.
Fi1m perspective
In Emma Moran's London everyone gets a superpower at eighteen, and it does them about as much good as a driving licence. Powers are used to dodge chores, to embarrass a friend, to make a bad night worse. Jen, the heroine of Extraordinary (2023), is the only person on her street without one, and the running joke is that she has mistaken this for the reason her life is going nowhere. Moran's trick is to take the genre about being the fastest and the strongest and hand it to people she has described as "a bit useless and a bit stupid and not very aspirational".
She came up through stand-up and sketch, with a show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017 and additional material for Have I Got News for You and Newsjack after the BBC Comedy Room took her on in 2019, and it shows. The lines are quick, filthy and well placed, and the found family at the centre is warmer than its mouth suggests. Extraordinary was written during her screenwriting MA at Manchester and the lockdowns, and by her own account the flatshare sitcom underneath it felt flat until she added the powers. She was right to add them. The world is the show's best idea, and she keeps finding new small, selfish uses for it.
What she has not yet shown is that she can plot. We laughed often enough at the first run of eight episodes to come straight back for the second, and we winced each time the show stopped to tell us it was all right to be ordinary, because a scene that had been funny a minute earlier shrank into a lesson. The clinic story in the first series arrives when a script needs it and leaves when it does not, and Siobhán McSweeney is handed one note as Jen's mother and asked to play it until the final episode. The second series, from 6 March 2024, is steadier: Rollason gets a story, Carrie gets wants of her own, Safia Oakley-Green's Andy gets more to do. Most critics liked the second run better, and so did we.
It ended there, after sixteen episodes, and that is a loss, because a world built this well had more in it than two series used. What comes next asks for exactly the muscle Extraordinary lacked: an adaptation of Bella Mackie's How to Kill Your Family, a comic thriller, and Honey, a Cold War spy series set in 1980s East Berlin for Sid Gentle Films. Thrillers do not forgive a plot that drifts. Moran has already shown she can write a line that lands; we would like to see whether she can make the next scene depend on it.
Biography
Emma Moran is a Northern Irish screenwriter and comedian from County Fermanagh. She is the creator and writer of the Disney+ superhero comedy series Extraordinary (2023–2024).
Moran developed the script for Extraordinary while completing an MA in Screenwriting at the University of Manchester, from which she graduated in 2020. The project originated as a flatshare comedy and won the inaugural Thousand Films scriptwriting competition before being optioned by Disney+ in 2021. The series received a BAFTA nomination for Best Scripted Comedy in 2024 and won Best Scripted Comedy at the Royal Television Society Programme Awards that year.
Her earlier credits include additional material for Have I Got News for You. She is also the creator of the forthcoming series Honey.
