Sophie Willan’s “sharp, silly” sitcom, “Alma’s Not Normal”, has returned to BBC Two for a second season and it’s “just as delightful and off-the-wall as ever”, said Emily Baker on the i news site.
The first instalment of the hit comedy saw the hugely likeable Alma Nuttall (loosely based on Willan and played by the comedian) on the verge of swapping her “frequently grim job as an escort” for a tour with a local theatre group, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian.
But “sadly for our hero”, Alma ends up being “lumped with the role of a tree” and, this season, returns to her home town of Bolton, where her mother’s boyfriend is being held “semi-captive” by her “imperious” grandmother, Joan (Lorraine Ashbourne). “Blacklisted” from the sex industry, she gets a job with her best friend Leanne (Jayde Adams) who has opened a bar in the back of a lorry.
The show is an excellent example of a small British comedy that’s been able to “flourish” among the “global juggernauts”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. Despite a 36-month gap between the seasons (“an ice age in TV time”), we should be glad that the “home-spun, northern-and-proud-of-it” show has made it to our screens at all. Willan has “both an ear for dialogue and an eye for a zinger”, and the show is “first and foremost a triumph of writing and performance”.
Alma’s “mentally ill, drug-addicted” mum, Lin, is the “star of the show”, thanks to Siobhan Finneran’s “funny but never mean-spirited” performance, said Baker on the i news site. And while you get a sense of the show’s “exasperation” with the chronically underfunded welfare state, it never “shoves its politics down your throat”. By adding a layer of “societal awareness” to her “genuinely funny” sitcom, Willan has created something that’s “truly special”.
While the second season “radiates rage and devastation”, it also manages to capture the first instalment’s “life-affirming vibe”, added Aroesti in The Guardian. As a “furiously real yet incorrigibly hilarious sitcom, it’s pretty much perfect”.