Kat Sadler makes selfishness funny without making embarrassment trivial. We recommend Such Brave Girls for the uncomfortable familiarity she builds with Lizzie Davidson, though her writing sometimes keeps the sisters complaining after the point is clear.
Fi1m perspective
In Such Brave Girls (2023), Kat Sadler’s Josie answers with something unpleasant before we have decided how much sympathy the situation deserves. Sadler lets the selfishness register without asking us to dismiss Josie as merely awful. We laughed at her responses, then felt uncomfortable because she lets the embarrassment outlast the joke. That is harder to sustain than a run of sharp insults. It is a performance worth watching even when the character is exhausting.
Her breakthrough came as the creator, writer and star of the series, after writing for programmes including The Mash Report and Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back. Josie wants sympathy but has little to spare for anyone else, and Sadler gives her enough selfishness to resist easy affection. The scripts give her plenty of opportunities to be tactless; her performance makes the consequences uncomfortable as well as funny. A second series followed in 2025, but our recommendation rests on the first. Its six episodes give us plenty to like, and enough repetition to identify the limit.
Lizzie Davidson plays Josie’s sister Billie, with Louise Brealey as their mother, Deb. Sadler and Davidson make the sisters’ familiarity convincing enough that the insults do not feel like separate sketches. We believe they know how to irritate each other, and that these quarrels are familiar to both of them. As more affection enters their scenes, neither performer suddenly makes her character easier to get along with. Brealey’s appalling mother is a considerable asset, though the sisters need their own convincing connection for this household to be worth spending time in.
The trouble comes when Sadler the writer asks Sadler the actor to demonstrate the same self-absorption again. Once we know how little patience the family has for one another’s troubles, further grievances can feel unnecessary. Brealey keeps us watching, but she cannot make every return to them worthwhile. Tighter writing would give Sadler’s sharp responses more room to surprise us. Start with the first series of Such Brave Girls, provided a comedy about people this reluctant to be considerate sounds like an evening well spent.
Biography
Kat Sadler is a British comedian, actress and writer. She was born in 1994 in Sutton, London, and studied film and literature at Warwick University, where she began writing sketches and performing stand-up comedy.
Sadler has written for programmes including The Mash Report, Joe Lycett's Got Your Back, The Jonathan Ross Show, Newsjack, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, The Now Show, The News Quiz, Hypothetical and Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable. In 2019 she won the BBC Radio Comedy Writers Bursary.
She created, wrote and stars as Josie in the BBC Three sitcom Such Brave Girls (2023), appearing alongside her real-life sister Lizzie Davidson. The series has won BAFTA Television Awards for Best Scripted Comedy and Emerging Talent: Fiction.
