Getting in THE MOOD
Why dark comedy Big Mood will be your new TV obsession
There’s not always much to laugh about these days, let’s be honest. So, we need good TV – more specifically, good comedy – more than ever. How, then, to satiate that need without neglecting real life entirely?
For a while now, dark comedies have provided the cure. Fleabag paved the way in 2016, then we had Aisling Bea’s series This Way Up and Daisy Haggard’s Back To Life in 2019, Jack Rooke’s
Big Boys in 2022, and
Cash Carraway’s Rain Dogs starring Daisy May Cooper in 2023. Between them, these comedies took on themes of death, depression, poverty, addiction and even murder, and still managed to make us laugh in the process.
Now, we’ve got Big Mood, which lands on Channel 4 on 28 March and centres on two best friends navigating their thirties while dealing with the complex effects of bipolar disorder. It’s funny, too, we promise.
LAUGH AND/OR CRY
Written by Camilla Whitehill, Big Mood joins an impressive roster of dark comedies that aren’t afraid of the meaty stuff, but it also moves the dial on how mental illness is depicted on screen. The six-parter, starring It’s A Sin’s Lydia West as Eddie, and Bridgerton and Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan as Maggie, follows two best friends through a chaotic series of events that tests their friendship, boundaries, and the extent to which they can support each other.
What’s clear from the outset is that Big Mood wants to show mental illness for what it really is: ugly and messy, but not something that strips people of their personalities.
“Life is terrible, but also sometimes fun,” the show’s creator Camilla jokes. “That’s what you live with, don’t you? You can be sitting in a hospital room and then make the dumbest joke in the world and start laughing. That’s life. It’s nice sometimes to feel like you’re not the only mental one.”
Nicola plays Maggie, a 30-year-old woman with bipolar disorder, and we see the extremities of her moods play out in full when she stops taking her prescribed lithium. Nicola says “It’s such a balancing act – it’s knowing she’s a very depressed person, but still having her be funny, and knowing that when people are depressed, it doesn’t get rid of their personality.”
For everyone involved,
it was important that being bipolar wasn’t given a glossy TV treatment. “I think a lot of people say, ‘I’m so depressed’, and they have a perfect blow-dry and lovely make-up,” says
‘Life is terrible,
but also fun’
Nicola. “It’s like, no, if I’m going to look shit, I’m going to look shiiiit. I really hate vanity on screen – just play the character as they’re meant to be played.”
FEMALE FRIENDSHIP
she’s been close friends with the show’s writer and creator for 15 years. The pair met at drama school in their early twenties and there was never any doubt that they’d end up working together professionally. Camilla says, “I’ve just always wanted to write a buddy comedy about women, and also women are way funnier than men. So, I never asked her. I was like, ‘You’re in my TV show! Surprise!’ I don’t care about schedules – Bridgerton, what?” Luckily, the stars aligned, although Nicola ended up filming much of Big Mood at the same time as Bridgerton.
In the show, Maggie and Eddie offer a cautionary tale about what happens when we expect too much from those closest to us. “You can’t put everything on one other person,” says Nicola. “It doesn’t matter if it’s your husband or your best friend or your sister, you have to spread the load out.” Lydia agrees. “In my twenties, I had some very intense friendships with women and flatmates. Very quickly, it became the level of toxic you see with Maggie and Eddie.”
This is still, at its core, a very funny show. It doesn’t serve to undermine female friendships, but rather to celebrate them in their entirety – warts ’n’ all. As Camilla says, “My female friendships are some of the most important relationships of my life and I don’t see them handled with the same detail that romantic relationships are.”
Hopefully, Big Mood helps to plug this gap, and makes you laugh at the same time. ■