From the beginning Smilf lays itself bare, quite literally. After lead character Bridgette makes a thwarted attempt at flirting during a basketball game, there’s some Girls-style matter-of-fact nudity during a bath scene. It serves as a decent indication of the type of comedy that’s to come, as does the frank title - that Smilf means Single Mom I’d Like to Fuck, though it quickly becomes apparent that Bridgette is more the Single Mom That Would Like to Fuck (granted, SMTWLF is less catchy). In the bath, Bridgette grabs a handful of her belly, stretch marks and all, and wiggles it around. “You did this to me,” she coos, splashing water towards her absurdly cute infant son Larry.
Smilf is not just a show about being a parent. It’s about young women and dating and sex, but Bridgette is having to navigate that world while also looking after her small child. In that respect, its rawness is its selling point and the catalyst for many of its best jokes, which, in the tradition of most modern comedies, are usually of the tragicomic variety. Frankie Shaw plays Bridgette, and Shaw – who was last seen in the first series of Mr Robot – clearly knows something about multi-tasking, having created, written and directed the show she also stars in. Bridgette is not breezing through life as a young, single mother; her experience is chaotic and unsettled, and she’s struggling both financially and emotionally.
Recent sitcoms like Catastrophe and Motherland have played on the stress and messiness of raising children. But in those shows, the families are so well-off that the viewer is left to wonder what dastardly deeds they did to end up with more than a corner of a patio in London. Smilf’s Boston is unforgiving. Bridgette is bringing up a toddler in a single room with a flaky sort-of support network comprised of her troubled mother Tutu (a subtle but vivid Rosie O’Donnell) and Larry’s father Rafi, the kind of never-quite-ex that she’s desperate to keep around. At one point, she runs out of clean towels to dry Larry, and resorts to a roll of kitchen paper; later, when rent money is scarce, there’s a mythical fantasy sequence about turning to sex work to pay the bills.
Its upfront, almost defiant bluntness turns out to be both a strength and a flaw. At its best, Smilf is dryly funny and deeply amiable. Since Bridesmaids, the quirky Australian roommate has become something of a comic staple - hello, Love - but here, Nelson (named after Mandela) is upgraded to Rafi’s girlfriend. What starts as a one-note gag about nipples quickly turns into a winning kind of warmth, and Nelson can even get away with admiring Bridgette’s “grittiness”. It’s impossible not to root for Bridgette, too, whose difficult past is alluded to often, to uncomfortable and bracing comic effect. In a roundabout way, a bulimic binge leads her to run into someone who she thinks might be able to check the current state of her vagina; when auditioning for a role as a soldier with PTSD, she’s so good that she’s asked if she’s been to war. “I was sexually abused by my dad,” she shrugs, leaving any awkwardness to percolate. “My sister was raped in college,” offers one of the producers, eventually, by way of sympathy.
In that instance, the brutality of the humour works, but there’s an occasional sense that Smilf tries too hard to be Fleabag-shocking, and that if it worked through some of its more confrontational tics, it would feel less self-conscious and more honest. In the first episode alone, the plot of which revolves around whether Bridgette’s vagina bears any resemblance to the one she had before childbirth, there are two vibrator-based interludes, and a sex scene that takes place, sort of, next to Larry, who’s hidden underneath a blanket. Boundaries are pushed and lines are crossed, and it only ever feels half necessary. Ironically, the best gags are the ones that are less eye-opening, and more casual in their bite. Still, it’s difficult not to be entirely charmed by Smilf, which, if it can settle its temperament just slightly, feels like a new kind of story, one that should be told, and in Frankie Shaw, it marks the arrival of an important and original voice.
Smilf continues on Sky Atlantic at 10:35pm on Wednesdays
