Louise Brealey

In Such Brave Girls (2023), Deb puts herself first with a certainty that makes anyone else’s needs seem an unreasonable interruption. Louise Brealey plays her as someone who sees no case to answer, and we rate the performance highly. We laughed when we wanted to be cross with her, because she makes Deb’s selfishness sound entirely sensible to Deb. The daughters still need a mother who cares about them, and Brealey does nothing to make that easier to forget.

Sherlock (2010–2017), in which she played Molly Hooper, established her screen profile. Her comic timing and pathos served that supporting role well, though the quirky, lovelorn parts could be confining. Subsequent work includes Cass in Back (2017) and Hazel in Brian and Charles (2022); Deb offers a sharp departure from the lovelorn parts. With Deb, the hurt falls on the people around her, rather than on the woman Brealey plays. We would welcome more parts that make such unsparing use of her comic timing.

Kat Sadler’s writing matters here: she gives Josie, played by Sadler, and Billie, played by Lizzie Davidson, enough selfishness of their own to keep the family from dividing neatly into culprit and victims. The insults work because each woman is protecting her own importance when somebody else needs care. Brealey’s particular contribution is to make Deb’s behaviour feel reasonable to the woman herself, however appalling it looks to us. That conviction keeps the mother from becoming an exercise in diagnosing bad parenting, and gives the comedy something more to work with than the simple fact of her unpleasantness.

The reservation is that Such Brave Girls sometimes repeats the family’s grievances after we have understood them. Brealey keeps us watching, but she cannot make every further display of self-absorption necessary. A little less repetition would give her more room to surprise us. Start with the first series, unless an evening with an entirely self-absorbed parent sounds rather too much like a family visit.