Flowers

Flowers is a British black comedy-drama television series that originally aired on Seeso, a digital platform, between 2016 and 2018. This unique and darkly whimsical series offers a narrative distinct from traditional family sitcoms, picking from the ostensibly obscure topics of mental health, relationships, and the human tendency to adapt. It is ultimately a story of reclamation—of love, life, and the human spirit—and cleverly sets a handful of tragicomic characters against the backdrop of a skewered yet familiar landscape of domestic ordinariness.

The series is created and written by Will Sharpe, who demonstrates a distinct perspective in his storytelling and, although having a sometimes woebegone demeanour, it manages to be jauntily optimistic without being naïve. Sharpe's screenplay highlights and pays tribute to the messy beauty of a dysfunctional family along with devoting space to unvarnished portrayals of mental illness, a topic often tiptoed around in contemporary television.

The Flowers family, around whom the series revolves, are eccentric, bracingly honest, and deeply flawed. They live in a tumbledown country house, seemingly isolated from the rest of the world. Their lives are fraught with personal issues, each reflecting a different facet of the human condition—despair, confusion, solitude, and hope.

Firstly, you have Maurice Flowers, the patriarch, wonderfully played by Julian Barratt. Maurice is a children's author on the decline, known for his gruesome series of illustrated books called "The Grubbs." His character is depressive and stunned by his recurrent fits of melancholia. His life, as it unravels throughout the series, showcases a heartfelt depiction of men’s mental health issues.

Next to Maurice stands his music teacher wife, Deborah, with a performance by Olivia Colman that brings nuances to life in an astonishingly real manner. Trying desperately to maintain positivity and normalcy, Deborah struggles with her earnestness to hold her family together, her husband's emotional distance and their crumbling marriage. Her portrayal of Deborah is deeply empathetic, revealing the character's profound emotional battle beneath a surface of optimistic cheerfulness.

The couple's 25-year-old illustrative daughter, Amy Flowers, is a socially awkward recluse who dabbles in music. There's also the twin, Donald, an inventor who has not yet moved out of the family home. Both are symbols of the millennial angst, each stuck in their unusual ways, navigating their unresolved adult issues while living in their childhood home.

This eccentric quartet is completed by Maurice's Japanese illustrator, Shun, played by series-creator Will Sharpe. Shun is a character consumed by the weight of his own passion, lending an energetic yet melancholy aura to the series.

Visual aesthetics are one of the standout aspects of the show. The Flowers' residence is an otherworldly blend of whimsical eccentricity, adorned by relics of past memories, and the surrounding landscapes are shot with an ethereal beauty—full of forests gleaming under foggy light and meadows breathing under the British sunsets—a visually stark contrast to the sometimes gloomy narrative.

Flowers' narrative threads around these characters' intricate lives in ways that draw attention away from their seemingly habitual mundanity and refocuses it on the ever-surprising, unpredictable, and irrepressible dance of human life and relationships. Their interactions, frustrations, and understanding of each other's oddities form a harmonious blend to produce memorable dramatic moments laced with raw but restrained humour.

Using humour as an antidote, Flowers wittily deals with the often heavy subject matter. Despite dark undertones, there are instances of slapstick, obscure fantasy elements, and whimsical visuals. Thick with wit, the dialogue is spiky and full of exhilarating sharp turns, making it a joy to follow.

The soundtrack of the series is striking, encapsulating the overall quirky ambience of the show. It fits seamlessly with the narrative, enhancing the charm of this eccentric ensemble while adding poignancy to more dramatic moments.

Flowers, throughout its exploration of discomforting themes against a backdrop of visual poetry, does a commendable job in showing that it's okay not to be okay. A story about the extraordinary in the ordinary, about heartache, healing, and, most importantly, about hope. It is one of the rare gems of television that treads the tightrope between bleak despair and resilient optimism skilfully; it is a series that reveals as much about the resilience of the human spirit as it does about its fragility. This heartfelt, deeply affecting, sometimes absurd tale of the Flowers family is a journey worth embarking on.