The young leads make this family comedy-drama funny and painful without overplaying either. We recommend it for the performances, though its closeness to family distress can make six episodes feel like a demanding evening.
Just Act Normal is a funny, affecting family comedy-drama, and its young cast is the reason to watch. We recommend it, with the caveat that being this close to other people’s troubles can become tiring. Writer Janice Okoh and director Nathaniel Martello-White trust the performances to make family life interesting without smoothing away its difficulties. The first series comprises six episodes, each running for 40 minutes.
Okoh’s writing allows humour to survive inside an account of family life under pressure. That matters more than the broad label of comedy-drama might suggest: we can enjoy the characters’ company while remaining concerned about them. The funny passages do not require us to forget the distress, or to apologise for laughing at people who are experiencing it. There is care in that balance, and enough subtlety to keep the series from telling us precisely what to feel.
Chenée Taylor plays Tiana, Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie plays Tanika and Akins Subair plays Tionne, and their performances justify the attention the series gives them. Their comic work is as important as their handling of distress. We were moved by the three leads because they make the family strain register without allowing it to account for everything about these people. They give us enough to like, and enough to wonder about, that concern comes without much prompting.
Martello-White deserves credit for keeping the acting from becoming a competition in visible suffering. This sort of drama can be exhausting when every performance insists on being noticed. Here we can enjoy the actors’ company, including their comic assurance, before thinking about how much the roles require of them. That helps the serious passages, because we have already found reasons to care about the people involved.
Adam Barnett’s cinematography and Anthony Combes’s editing are harder to praise separately from the acting, which is not a complaint. Our attention belongs to the young cast throughout. A series about family pressure needs its images and cuts to allow us to follow several feelings at once; here, we can laugh and still notice the strain. We remember the people far more readily than any individual piece of filmmaking.
Our reservation is the amount of emotional attention this asks for across six episodes. The humour helps, but family distress remains demanding company, and we sometimes wanted a little more breathing space. That limits our enthusiasm, even with acting this persuasive. Okoh’s subtlety makes the difficulties convincing, but does not necessarily make spending time with them easier. Anyone choosing chiefly on the strength of the comedy label should bear that in mind.
The performances deserve more than an occasional glance while doing something else. Much of the pleasure comes from appreciating how confidently these young actors handle material that asks them to be funny and affecting, sometimes uncomfortably close together. That does not mean treating the programme as a solemn duty. Give it an episode for Taylor, Walker-Wilkie and Subair, and let their humour decide whether to stay.
