
If you’re wary of spin-offs, as I have been ever since Aaron Spelling ripped a rib from the heaving breastbone of Dynasty and crudely fashioned it into The Colbys – this was in 1985, but those wigs live long in the memory – then it’s possible you’ll have been dreading the arrival of the show I’m about to review. But fear not. In south-west London, a certain monster roams once again, an oat-milk something-or-other carefully clasped in a manicured hand. Dressed in shades of putty and ecru, her luxuriant hair falling about her shoulders in waves that bring to mind the sea at a top-ten influencer holiday destination, this creature is, perhaps, even more terrifyingly single-minded than before. Just listen to her! “I am the face and hair and body and brains of Senuous,” she yells, as if posting on Instagram was as good as running a FTSE corporation.
I speak, of course, of Amanda (Lucy Punch), formerly the queen bee of the BBC’s peerless sitcom, Motherland, and now the star of her own series. A couple of years have passed; following her divorce, she has had to replace her Chiswick vastness with the top half of a vaguely peeling Victorian terrace in south Harlesden (or as she calls it, “SoHar”). But, no matter. Time cannot wither Amanda, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Even if I do miss Julia, Liz and, especially, Kevin – the Motherland gang – I’m transfixed by her (non-)reinvention, a new life that involves state schools (so much more likely little Georgie and Manus will get into Oxbridge), a bicycle (even greener than the Tesla) and a branded, maroon Aertex T-shirt (not even she can spin this one).
The show’s writers – Holly Walsh, Helen Serafinowicz, Barunka O’Shaughnessy and Laurence Rickard – have done sterling work creating a new bunch of regulars to wind up (and get wound up by) Amanda. All four are school parents: Mal (Samuel Anderson), who lives in the flat below; JJ (Ekow Quartey), who is married to Mal’s ex-wife; and Della (Siobhán McSweeney) and Fi (Rochenda Sandall), a lesbian couple, one half of whom is chef-patron of SoHar’s coolest restaurant, Shin.
But there are familiar faces, too, in the form of Anne (Philippa Dunne), Amanda’s masochistic friend, and Felicity (Joanna Lumley), her former-model mother, and when the old and the new worlds collide, you’d have to be a wardrobe or a standing stone not to laugh out loud. There is a scene involving Della and Fi’s hot tub – “I don’t use chlorine!” announces Fi, waving a bit of bay tree in the direction of a gagging Amanda – that’s so frantic and funny and heavy with social embarrassment, it already feels like a classic of the genre: The Good Life for the Instagram generation.
Ah, yes. Instagram. Amanda is broke and, because she is qualified to do precisely nothing, is trying to make it as a guru of minimalism (“I don’t amass, I eschew”). Senuous (“no, not Sensuous”) stands for sensual luxury, and a photographer from SoHar Highlife (free, but so “aspirational”) will be coming over soon to shoot her at home (“next stop, Livingetc!”). Part of what’s painfully funny about Amanda is the pitiful way she’s always behind the curve. “It’s like watching The Bear,” she says to Della, having inveigled her way into her kitchen. When Della says something about matching food and wine, her follow-up is an enthusiastic: “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin!”
Her inner emptiness is a form of minimalism in itself, and its cause is her mother, who is as posh as Queen Camilla and colder than the Thames in midwinter. The best comedies often breathe a faint sadness, and Amandaland is one of them. It has things to say about our present vanity and extreme neediness – the endless scroll of the 21st century – but it’s less acid than the series that gave birth to it. There’s a hint of Larkin’s coastal shelf here, man handing on misery to man, the grand metaphor for this being, in the second episode, a car boot sale at which Amanda cannot bear to sell any of her “curated archive” and her mother drinks ancient brandy from an old vase while completely ignoring her. But that’s enough from Dr Freud for now. In short, it’s genius. Motherland is dead, long live Amandaland!
Amandaland
BBC iPlayer
[See also: “Prime Target”: a show so preposterous it’s almost addictive]
This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI