(courtesy IMP Awards)
Making all your dreams come true is an intoxicating feeling, but what happens when the dust settles and reality bites and you have to deal with the fact that the dream may be wonderful but it has some thorns attached with all the floral zest and colour?
Trying, one of those smart, clever and supremely witty modern short-form British dramedies which are happily everywhere at the moment, and which has never been afraid to mix whimsy and love with serious consideration of life’s more real issues, dived right into the more sage consequences of happily-ever-after when Nikki and Jason (Esther Smith and Rafe Spall) finally adopted brother and sister Princess and Tyler (Scarlett Rayner and Cooper Turner respectively) and became the family they had always dreamed of being.
Season four has more than its fair share of challenging moments with Princess trying to find her birth mother Kat (Charlotte Riley) and Nikki getting embroiled in the search and the messy aftermath, and season five takes that even further with Kat now firmly in the picture, something which makes Princess happy, Tyler indifferent (he never really knew his mum) and Nikki worried in charmingly neurotic trademark fashion that she’s about to be replaced by her daughter’s birth mother.
Much of the humour of the early suite of episodes comes from Nikki’s fretting which like most anxious moments actually doesn’t play as badly as envisaged – you have to hand it to anxiety, it is certainly adept at putting the catastrophic cat among the pigeons – and watching her do things she hates like riding rollercoasters simply so she doesn’t leave Princess along with Kat.
Jason, who starts his studies to be a social worker during this season and discovers the generation gap is real with all the other students far younger than him, is there as the voice of comforting reason for Nikki, but even he is not immune to the anxieties that come from parenting two kids who are very much yours and yet somehow, sometimes, feel they’re not because someone i.e. Kat could take their hearts, if not their legal standing as Jason and Nikki’s kids.
In keeping with previous seasons, what triumphs in the end is the way devoted, caring love triumphs over everything else.
The great gift of Trying is that though it has its out-there humourous moments, most notably this season when Nikki’s brother-in-law Scott (Darren Boyd) decides to row across the Atlantic with hilariously unforeseen consequences, it is adept at folding its big emotional moments into the nuanced and quiet flow of its comedy which always lands but is out there for big belly laughs.
The show is at its best when it keeps thing low key and simple, with much of its gently comedic highlights sitting in what feels like a real-life flow of big and small moments, that kind that look like most of our lives and which ring true because life’s most transformative punctuation points often sit in deceptively small and quiet moments.
Of course when it wants to go big, it goes BIG.
There is one episode where everyone gathers at Nikki’s sister Karen’s (Sian Brooke) place when news emerges that a destructive hurricane (is there any other kind?) is bearing down on the exact place Scott is supposed to be, somewhere near the Azore Islands; it’s a typically over the top trademark Trying group episode when the whole extended family all comes together and hearts are worn very much on sleeves and surreally silly comedic flashpoints are everywhere.
What’s lovely about group episodes like this is that underscores how much of Trying lives in the context of a very unusual found family which includes in-laws and birth mothers and adopted kids and best friends, all of whom belong to each other in ways that emphasise we are defined, supported and loved by the diverse mix of people around us.
This episode, aptly titled “The Hurricane”, while based on an hilarious premise that is spoiler-heavy and must be left to the watching of the season, has everything we love about the series with all kinds of overbearing but well-meaning love and care – Karen is always happiest when those she loves are at a convenient arm’s length – physical comedy, mainly courtesy of Nikki and Karen’s dad John (Roderick Smith) who can’t figure out how to open the draws in Karen and Scott’s expensive kitchen, and a general sense of inclusivity and care.
It may get a bit of a messy bump at the end of the episode but it rights itself in later episodes and proves that while families like that of Nikki and Jason are odd, they are gloriously odd in all the best ways.
While many of the ensemble characters don’t get as much to do this season, with the various episodes concentrating heavily on Nikki, Jason, Princess and Tyler and the loving awkwardness that defines their lives, people like Jason’s widowed dad Vic (Phil Davis) who accidentally founds a sprawling home handyperson corporate empire and Nikki’s daffy parents, including mum Jilly (Marian McLaughlin), still get enough airtime to remind us of what a fabulously strange but caring extended family encompasses everything the main characters are going through.
What is exactly that is a lot of spoilers that should not see the light of day here, but all of them pan out in ways that might upset the apple cart of the family in big and small ways but which are ultimately dealt with – I give you everything to do with Kat, Nikki’s maybe work crush and Tyler’s first-ever girlfriend – by the fact that everyone is part of a loving and supportive family that evades being American picture postcard perfect by being allowed to have flaws and make mistakes.
In fact, it’s note at one point that their immediate and wider families are “not normal” but Jason rather quietly but impactfully adds that very few families are and they are, in many ways, a typically loving family, one which fills Trying with laughter, awkwardness, hugs, anxiety, fraught moments, the serious and the silly and in the end a wondrously warm and beautiful sense of being loved which is really what you want from life and which makes all the bumpy stuff not feel so bad after all.
Trying streams on AppleTV