The relationship between sisters is like no other ā you may want to kill each other one moment, but are connected for life, no matter how much you have in common or what life puts your through. It's a pretty amazing thing.
A BBC sitcom covering the ups and downs of sisterly bonds, as well as mother-daughter dynamics, named Such Brave Girls, is diving deep into this connection. From the producers of I May Destroy You and written by stand up comic and TV joke writer Kat Sadler, we're predicting many many laughs, alongside a very British interrogation of female family dynamics.
Here's everything we know about the show, which starts this week.
Julianne Moore also stars in this Oscar-tipped drama.
According to the BBC's official synopsis, Such Brave Girls is a ādysfunctional family sitcomā that follows "sisters Josie (Kat Sadler) and Billie (played by Katās real-life sister, Lizzie Davidson) and their single mother Deb (Louise Brealey) navigating life armed with nothing but poor judgement and self-esteem exclusively tied to people who couldn't care less about them.
āThey're vain, selfish, heavily in debt, pathologically desperate for affection and bursting with misplaced, terrifying love.ā
We're thinking it's going to straddle the real-life problems that families and young women go through ā debt, mental health issues, love life issues ā told through the prism of comedy.
Real-life sisters Kat Sadler (the show's script writer) and newcomer Lizzie Davidson take on the roles of Josie and Billie, while Louise Brealey (Sherlock) plays Deb, their mum.
Paul Bazeley (Benidorm), Amy Trigg, Haruka Kuroda (Killing Eve), Richard Cunningham, Tina Louise Owens, Jennifer Daley (2 Broke Girls) also star.
Kat Salder describes Such Brave Girls as being about āthree damaged narcissists who are desperate for loveā ā hard relate. She adds that it explores ātrauma and dark subject mattersā, with the story being tightly bound to her own relationship with her sister. These plotlines āwould normally be dealt with in a drama territory, and moving it into a comedy space because thatās how we deal with our issues,ā she said. āBut itās proudly a sitcom.ā
When asked how autobiographical the show is when it comes to her and Lizzie's experiences, Kat responded: āThatās the fun of this show, Iām taking issues that we dealt with in reality and finding the most manipulative cathartic way of dealing with it in the sitcom world.ā
She recalls how the idea for Such Brave Girls came from a phone call she had with Lizzie in lockdown, and how they both revealed that they'd had huge things going on in their lives and kept them concealed from each other ā and the comedy that came with that.
"At the start of lockdown, I had this call with my sister. Neither of us had been speaking much, and over the phone I had to tell her Iād been sectioned, and then she told me she ended up in Ā£20k worth of debt that sheād been keeping a secret. I donāt know how weād been keeping these big secrets from each other for a really long time.
āWe both just burst out laughing after weād told each other what had happened, and it made me realise that you do just deal with the most serious things through comedy, and it's always struck me how we can always make each other laugh, even in the darkest times.ā
Lizzie called having her sister on set for her first acting job āa privilegeā, but that didn't mean there were sisterly moments of conflict.
āWe had this huge argument one morning, and then we had to film a scene where we're sitting on a bed together and we could not be sitting further apart,ā she recalls. āWe refused to speak to each other in between takes, we were furious at each other. But then moments later, we're back in her trailer in the bathroom, brushing our teeth together, panicking about the kissing scenes we both had coming up.ā
It is available to watch from today (Wednesday 22 November) at 10pm on BBC Three and, of course, BBC iPlayer.
There is indeed, prepare for messed up sister and parent dynamics and a lot of laughs.
