In the very first minutes of the sitcom Flowers, Julian Barratt’s character, Maurice, a depressed children’s author, ties a noose to a tree, slips it round his neck and jumps from a chair. The branch snaps almost immediately. “Fuck’s sake,” he grumbles and trudges back inside.
That first series, broadcast two years ago, was bolstered by an extraordinary cast including Olivia Colman (soon to play Elizabeth II in The Crown) and Daniel Rigby, who won a Bafta playing Eric Morecambe. Bold and grotesque, it had the feel of a grownup fairytale, a strange, sad and often very funny story of depression and family dysfunction.
“I signed up having read the scripts and finding them brilliant,” says Barratt, who spends much of the second series dealing with the aftermath of the first – and wearing running shorts. “It’s not a standard sitcom.”
Earlier this year, the Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson, not averse to an otherworldly aesthetic and pitch-black humour himself, was discussing his love of Flowers on the Adam Buxton Podcast, calling it “fully formed” and “perfect”. It is the kind of comedy to inspire devotion. The new series, which kicks off its week-long run on Monday, focuses on Maurice’s daughter Amy, who sets out to solve a mystery buried deep in the past of the Flowers family. Or as she puts it: “Just trying to work out how to break the curse on our family without murdering everyone and burning the house down.”
The idea for Flowers came from a single image – “this tumbledown house, and a slightly bleak garden, which in the second series is in full bloom,” explains Will Sharpe, who wrote, directs and stars in the show.
Flowers seems to inhabit a genre all of its own, carving a strange and often unsettling path through its oddly domestic stories. In the first series, Maurice is deeply depressed and unable to talk to his family about it. Deborah, played by Colman with a heartbreaking near-optimism, is making a farcical attempt at an open marriage, while their adult twins, Donald and Amy, still live in a childlike world, in which Donald is an inventor and Amy an artist who is dealing with her own issues from beneath that dense fringe. Sharpe has taken to calling the show “a comedy with a mental illness”.
“The subject matter is powerful stuff,” says Barratt. “I suppose it’s a lot to do with trauma and mental health and not having worked out the pain of your childhood and having it all erupt.”
Not, then, a standard sitcom. Like the films of Wes Anderson, Flowers has a unique visual style. The second series begins with Amy meeting a witch-like woman on a bridge covered in animal faeces who hands her a suitcase filled with family heirlooms. It’s a testament to the show’s tone that it manages to be both deadly serious about its subject matter and also maintain a running joke about how much a family surname sounds like “bum-gardener”.
While the public conversation around mental health is becoming increasingly open, its portrayal on TV is still a mixed bag. There are signs that programme-makers are learning, though, in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. In Britain, much of the talking is done through soaps, while some of the more creative US comedies in recent times have spun mental illness into surreal humour, to great acclaim.
My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explores borderline personality disorder with a musical twist, Lady Dynamite is a cartoonish, whip-smart series that used Maria Bamford’s real-life mental breakdown as its backbone, while even Broad City – usually a laid-back stoner romp through New York’s streets – focused an episode on Ilana’s depression, via a secret hideaway made of foil and seasonal affective disorder lamps.
Flowers is different. While mental health is in its fabric, the show is as much about facing one’s past, or finding one’s family. Colman and Barratt play the squabbling, struggling mother and father with a strangely moving balance of animosity and affection. Sharpe says that even now he can’t quite fathom how he ended up with such a cast. “I ask myself the same question.” One of the draws, surely, was its originality. Sharpe says Flowers was pitched as a comedy-drama. “I thought, if I could write anything, what would it be? One of the key phrases was that this is going to be an uplifting comedy about melancholy. I don’t think I was constantly playing that around in my head, but it did end up being that.”
The second series moves from melancholy Maurice – now medicated and subject to a wry mindfulness regime – to Amy, whose artistic leanings have begun to boil over into something more difficult to express. “We had a scene where she was diagnosed, where the idea that her behaviour towards the end of series one might have hypomanic connotations,” says Sharpe. It was cut because it didn’t feel quite right. “So I’ve always had a feeling that she might be bipolar, and probably the first thing I knew about the second series was that I wanted it to be set in a different season. I wanted it to look summery, for the grey to be warmer and more colourful. That seemed to tie in with exploring the more hypomanic, the mini-manic if you like, side of bipolar.”
Flowers’ portrayal of mental illness was so convincing in conveying the grey and suffocating sludge of Maurice’s depression that more perceptive viewers might have already wondered what insight its creator had. I ask Sharpe how his brain works, meaning creatively, given that the show runs from weaving a children’s story into the very first episode, to the grand orchestral piece that Amy composes during the second. “OK. How does my brain work?” he says, taking a deep breath. “Well, I like telling stories, and from a creative point of view, we always wanted to make this its own thing. So if anything started to feel too familiar, we would try to abandon it.” At one point during the second series, the tension between Maurice and Deborah erupts over the inappropriate size of a pastry.
“The other thing that I’m happy to talk about is that I have type two bipolar,” Sharpe says. “So a lot of the stuff that I’m writing about is not directly from experience, but obviously my worldview is affected by that.”
The responsibility to “get it right”, when it comes to a subject as sensitive as mental illness, has weighed on Sharpe’s mind, not least because he’s exploring it in the context of a comedy. There’s a critical scene in which Shun, played by Sharpe, gets fall-down drunk at a fancy dinner. The hilarity of watching him in a slapstick scenario soon gives way to an upsetting and shocking rant; it’s a very Flowers trick to switch emotional tack in a heartbeat, and it is brilliantly uncomfortable and disturbing.
Considering how funny Flowers can be, does Sharpe find humour in the darker moments of life? “The one thing I was almost militant about was not to laugh at anyone’s mental state, and to try to write complicated situations that, unfortunately, were unfolding in an unhelpful way for the characters.” Sharpe speaks slowly, carefully considering his point. “Rather than finding comedy in difficult times, I find laughter a helpful way to make yourself feel better. I don’t feel like having a mental illness rules out a kind of joyful, fulfilling life.”
While series one dealt with Maurice’s illness, and hinted at Amy’s mania, the latter becomes more of a focus this time around. Sophia Di Martino, who plays her, says that moving into the centre of the action was “a little daunting, having such a big story”. Like Barratt, she was struck by Flowers’ originality, right from the early pitch. “The character breakdown was something like, ‘Amy is a frustrated artist in her attic bedroom. She’s so complex and that sort of wild energy she has is really exciting.’” While trying her best to channel that energy into music, Amy is also working out what happened to Maurice’s magician father, Felix, which takes the show into a gruesome series of semi-historical flashbacks. “Also, it really made me laugh. And the laughs come at the right time to relieve the heaviness.”
Barratt says that after the first series, viewers seemed receptive to its balance of comedy and pain (and at times the second series is very painful indeed). “It’s very much at the forefront, isn’t it, the mental health aspect? I suppose most of us are going through something like this, especially in this country, where we have a particular sort of emotional brittleness and lack of ability to speak about things. The themes are quite overt and powerful and painful, but obviously that undersells the comedy within.”
Sharpe sees the old series and the new as two halves of a whole. “I feel like you haven’t seen Flowers until you’ve seen the second series. The two speak to each other. I felt like there was stuff left to say and places left to go with these characters.” But if the circle is complete, does that mean there won’t be any more? Sharpe hedges his bets. “I feel like this is a good place to put the pen down. For now.”
- Flowers starts on Channel 4 at 10pm on Monday.
