Released quietly in 2023 on the BBC, Such Brave Girls quickly became one of the breakout titles in British comedy. The critics’ unanimous praise and its cult status in the United States, where it premiered on Hulu with backing from A24, culminated in a BAFTA for Best Comedy and transformed its creator, Kat Sadler, into one of the most celebrated new voices in television fiction.
In Spain, it arrived via Filmin, and its impact was modest. The launch of the second season, also on Filmin, offers a good opportunity to advocate for it anew. The idea for Such Brave Girls was born from a collision of personal dramas: Sadler told her sister, the actress Lizzie Davidson (who also plays her sister in the series), that she had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after two suicide attempts. She, in turn, made another confession: she carried a debt of no less than £20,000.
Mental health, money, and romantic relationships are the three pillars around which Such Brave Girls revolves. The series revisits the old wedding-plot motif of Jane Austen novels—Pride and Prejudice is not mentioned by accident—and updates it in a satirical, black-humor key, set against a backdrop of economic precarity and emotional vulnerability.
Toxic relationships, marriages of convenience, sugar babies… This second season continues to sharpen the comedic edge of the central conflict that underpinned the first season: the difficulty of balancing feminism with feelings, desire, and mere survival instinct. Love, health, and poverty demand so much attention that keeping to the manual of the good feminist becomes almost impossible, no matter how much you want to.
Sadler, as a good stand-up comic, is a machine for delivering jokes and creating funny situations. Although at times her narrative may feel a little loose, the humor arises very organically, from the disastrously imperfect way her characters tackle their problems.
The second season exploits still more effectively that blend of cruelty and vulnerability. The worse things go for the protagonists, the funnier the series becomes; and the more we laugh with them, the more apparent it is that beneath all that sharpness there are three women desperate to find something resembling love, security, or simply a way to make ends meet.
