(courtesy IMP Awards)
Lisa (Antonia Thomas) and Danny (Craig Roberts) have a problem.
Well, two in fact, one quite obvious which literally defines their waking hours and the other, lurking just out of reach, which subconsciously tinges and influences their every conversation, all of which happen in the dead of night when everyone is sound asleep.
Which leads us to the first problem which unites the two in a bond that provides shared comfort but also a great deal of frustration – their insomnia.
The two besties from way back have tried everything from pills to sleep clinics (well, Danny has; Lisa finally does in one of the first four episodes with hilarious consequences) to herbals remedies to inspiring coaches and each time have come away with sleep eluding them and the wee small hours beckoning to them in a state of ever present alertness.
Their only solace is the fact that they can call each other and chat away, confident they will still be up, hence the title Still Up, and that they alone, among friends and family, get what the other is going through.
Lisa does have a partner, Veggie (Blake Harrison), a sweet but slightly boring guy who treats her well and with whom she shares a 52% dating app compatibility (that matters in one episode), and a daughter, and so has a life of some sorts that sends her to late night pharmacies – episode one, appropriately titled “The Pharmacy” introduces the two with some whimsy, sparklingly fun dialogue and a sense of the comedically ridiculous which comes to define this delightfully engaging series – while Danny, still traumatised by the breakup of his relationship with unseen ex and serial cheater Chloe, works as a journalist from home, quite unable to step over the doorway of his apartment.
They both have issues of a kind and while the first four half hour-long episodes see them trying to deal with their insomnia (Lisa) or move ahead with their life, romantically and professionally (Danny), they never quite make where they want to go, falling back to old patterns which have come to define their rich, buoyant but maybe a little emotionally unhealthy friendship.
And that, of course, brings us to their second problem, the one neither is willing to admit is there, and which, in a strict sense, is not a problem at all.
The thing is Danny and Lisa LIKE each other; not just like each other which makes sense since they are BFFs, but LIKE each other in that destined to be together, 91% compatibility kind of way (at one point Lisa signs Danny up to a dating app, and while his subsequent romantic adventures don’t go well, it emerges that he and Lisa are really, REALLY suited for each other) which Lisa begins to realise and which they can’t really do anything about.
Danny, god bless him, is oblivious to the URST (unresolved sexual tension percolating between them) and finds Lisa’s constant phone calls when he has a date over to his place, a little bothersome when things seem to be going so well with bubbly personal trainer Amy (episode three, “The Date”) – well, until they don’t and it’s messily hilarious when things do go south – and he thinks he may have someone he can be with.
Lisa, is, of course, consumed by a nagging jealousy and a sense that while Veggie is lovely, he’s not as fulfilling a companion as Danny is; still, she keeps pushing those thoughts down because what can she do about them?
Acting on her love of Danny, though she has yet to actually admit to herself that’s there, would mean all kinds of messy and destruction and she’s not sure she wants to muck with the good thing she has going with Veggie, even if it is nowhere as fulfilling as she’d like.
In these first four episodes of Still Up, created by Steve Burge and Natalie Walter, we’re still in the getting-to-know-them phase which means we have two people who clearly like each other and who turn to each other in the hard, troubling times of life such as when an idiot fellow bus passenger steals and wears Lisa’s dress which she’s returning to her dead aunt’s house (long but very funny and suitably quirky story) and so what likely lies in wait in the back half of the first season of the show is still off on the narrative radar.
But there’s enough on view now to know that somewhere along the line there will be a romantic reckoning, and it likely won’t be well handled and will be incredibly messy because while Lisa and Danny are quite likeable characters they are, like most of us, stumbling their way through life and not always making the best decisions.
That, naturally, is great fuel for comedy and Still Up runs with it, serving up perfectly-formed, richly funny and thoroughly satisfying episodes which are rom-com centric it’s true but which spend as much time exploring what life is like when it mostly takes place when everyone else is asleep, and how that isolation and bubble world which results uniquely shapes how their lives play out.
Still Up is streaming on AppleTV+