What happens if a young couple move into their new rental flat together and break up on the very same day? That’s the premise of this endearing new comedy from writer Jess Bray and director Alice Snedden, who paint a bittersweet portrait of young love in a precarious economy.
Stand-up Lara Ricote is Lil, a woman in her early twenties who is moving from Leeds to London to take up her first real job at an architectural firm. At their graduation ceremony, her boyfriend Ben (Samuel Bottomley), an aspiring writer, announces that he will take the plunge and move to London with her. But at his leaving party, the night before they move, Ben cheats on Lil, who promptly finds out about it and dumps him the next day. To break the lease on their new flat would be prohibitively expensive. They decide, instead, to remain flatmates while living their newly single, independent lives.
The show is part romcom, part exploration of an extended adolescence, in which adults are expected to run a household and have jobs and maintain healthy relationships while still feeling that they are barely out of school uniform. This disconnect between expectation and reality is mined for laughs, but with plenty of feeling. Ben and Lil attempt to throw a dinner party in order to prove their status as mature adults. But a bin-diving expedition derails their plans. As a writer, Ben is perennially cash-strapped; he solves this problem with a combination of tutoring and medical trials which produce a vomit-strewn spectacle.
The romcom element is sweeter than expected. Lil and Ben clearly love each other and are merely going through the motions of a break-up. The show is saved from being overly saccharine, however, by suggesting that they are codependent, and is refreshingly uneasy about what it is that keeps them together. Around halfway through the series, we begin to see the darker underbelly of the relationship. Lil is the more mature of the two, with a career stretching out ahead of her, but she is easily pulled back into Ben’s chaos.
Over six episodes, they try to find what they want from life. Break Clause holds its head a little higher than most comedies, mostly due to the innate charm of the cast. Rooster’s Charly Clive is the couple’s upstairs neighbour, a certified grown-up, while half the cast of Saturday Night Live UK seem to have roles here. Bottomley is believably dolorous as the lost Ben, while you can’t help but root for Ricote as Lil, whose story becomes more fleshed out as the series progresses. It is low-key and surprisingly gentle, then, but it creeps up as one of the year’s most winning new comedies.
★★★★☆
On Channel 4 now