Boxing Clever: Amandaland
Every week, Michael Telfer – Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This week's choice is a sharp, chaotic comedy built around a character you might be surprised to find yourself rooting for
Successful spin offs from TV shows are rarer than hen’s teeth, which are apparently incredibly rare.
For every Better Call Saul there’s a Joey, and for every Frasier there’s a Baywatch Nights. As the ancient proverb goes, it’s a fine line between milking a golden cow and setting it on fire. Or something.
Thankfully Amandaland, the spin off to Motherland, is a hen’s tooth. A blue moon. A perfectly-plopped rocking horse turd.
Motherland was a hugely popular BBC sitcom that ran for three seasons and a handful of specials from 2016 to 2022, and was uncomfortably hilarious for both parents and non-parents alike.
The show followed beleaguered mums Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Liz (Diane Morgan) and stay at home Dad Kevin (Paul Ready) as they tried in vain to juggle parenting with their work and love lives, and keep up with the alpha mum Amanda (Lucy Punch) and her sidekick Anne (Phillippa Dunne).
Over the course of the show’s life the main characters formed an inseparable bond that stretched way beyond the confines of the school playground and the car pool. We saw them at their best and their worst, and we rooted for them through every excruciating drama.
The character of Amanda was often the cartoon villain, the graceful swan equally at home in the school fundraiser or her immaculate store (NOT shop!), always flawlessly dressed and ready with an acerbic put down to let everyone know where they stood in the Mums’ food chain.
Amandaland puts Amanda squarely at the centre of proceedings. By taking some of the Motherland characters and most of the writers, the new show stays fresh and preserves the quality of writing and humour. The gags are as good as they ever were and Amanda and Anne provide plenty of room for new narrative and growth.
Lucy Punch revels in the lead role, gradually peeling back the layers of the character we’d loved to hate for so long to show a softer and more vulnerable side. She’s still horrific when she wants to be, but at least we can start to see why.
Amanda’s incredible (in every sense) mother Felicity is played with delicious precision by Joanna Lumley. Originally a guest character in Motherland, she becomes a major figure here and, while still gloriously self-absorbed, Amandaland gives her more depth and vulnerability than we’ve seen before.
She can still puncture Amanda’s confidence with a single line and has a habit of siding with whichever questionable man has wandered into her daughter’s life, but there are flashes of warmth and loneliness beneath the armour.
However her mother’s behaving, Amanda always has her longstanding and ever-faithful sidekick Anne to lean on.
What Amanda largely sees as unquestioning loyalty is revealed to be something much more layered in Amandaland, with Anne often recognising the insecurities and vulnerabilities Amanda works so hard to mask. Their friendship is still gloriously uneven and frequently exasperating, but beneath the passive-aggressive exchanges and social awkwardness there’s genuine affection holding it together.
And that is a big part of the magic of Amandaland. The titular princess may be shallow, insensitive and cutting, but she’s also a newly single mum trying to forge her way in a world that’s been turned upside down, and that makes her, somehow, relatable. She might turn her nose up at Tesco, but she’s one of us, almost.
She’s also outrageously hilarious. The brilliant writing team of Holly Walsh, Barunka O’Shaughnessy, Laurence Rickard and Helen Serafinowicz (whose brother Peter pops up as series one’s memorable love interest Johannes) unsurprisingly hit the ground running and provide her with some of the best one liners you’ll ever hear.
Season one of Amandaland is available on the iPlayer now, along with the Christmas special, which as a bonus features Jennifer Saunders. Season two dropped last week and new episodes are available every Wednesday.