Things You Should Have Done

Chi With A C created it, co-wrote it with Nathan Foad and plays the lead, and the whole thing rests on one joke she tells well: a young woman whose parents have just died and who cannot be made to react. Chi lives at home, has never worked, and in the first episode her mum (Martha Cope) and dad (Darren Strange) are killed. A solicitor (Sunil Patel) reads a will that leaves her the house on condition she completes a list of things she should have done by now. Her aunt Karen (Selin Hizli) and uncle Dave (Daniel Fearn) move in to see that she does. Six episodes of 29 minutes follow, first shown on 29 February 2024, and they are funny, silly and thinner than they need to be.

The lead is the reason to watch. Chi With A C delivers every line in the same flat monotone, as if reading an announcement somebody else wrote, and she never once lets us see her reaching for a laugh. Told her parents are dead, she looks mildly inconvenienced. Told she must learn to drive, she treats it as an imposition on a level with the bereavement. It is a narrow instrument and she knows how to play it; the best moments in the series are reaction shots in which nothing happens on her face for a second longer than is comfortable. We laughed out loud in the first episode, more than once, and felt faintly ashamed of ourselves afterwards, because what we were laughing at was a girl declining to grieve.

Hizli does the real work around her. Karen has lost a sister and moved into that sister’s house to look after a niece who will not be looked after, and Hizli plays her with a brisk, wounded patience that makes the deaths register in a way the script seldom bothers to. Fearn’s Dave is all enthusiasm and no judgement, a man who says yes to a scheme before hearing the end of it. Jamie Bisping’s Lucas is the one person in the house who speaks to Chi as if she were a person, and the episodes improve whenever he is in them. Bridget Christie, as Ruth, brings a tone of weary disbelief that suits the show, and Sarah Kendall and Sinéad Matthews turn up along the way and do more with a scene each than the writing strictly offers.

Jack Clough directs it plainly: bright suburban rooms, the camera held still, nobody allowed to move faster than Chi does. That is the right choice. Gareth McEwen’s cutting is the other half of the joke, because he leaves each dead line hanging a beat and then cuts away without comment, and the gap is where the laugh lives. When the show wants a set piece it gets one quickly and cheaply, and the cheapness suits it.

The trouble is the shape. Each episode takes an item from the list, builds a scheme around it, lets the scheme collapse and then, in the last two minutes, asks us to feel something about the parents. The feeling has not been earned, because for the previous 27 minutes the series has worked hard to make sure we felt nothing, and the switch is a reflex rather than an idea. By the fourth episode we noticed we were waiting for the next line rather than wondering what Chi would do, and we checked how many episodes were left. There were two.

British television has a long line of sitcoms built around a single performer’s odd voice, from Vic and Bob to Matt Berry in Toast of London, and the good ones gave the voice a world to live in. This gives it a house and a list. The reviews so far split between delight at how stupid it is prepared to be and complaint that there is not enough underneath, and both are right. The show is at its best when it forgets the list and simply lets its lead be strange in a kitchen.

Watch it at home, two episodes at a time, with someone who finds properly stupid things funny; a 29-minute dose is about right and a six-episode sitting is not. A second series followed in January 2026. The first is worth an evening to find out whether the voice is for you, and you will know within ten minutes.