2 out of 5

Created by: Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli

covers season 1

There are maybe three worthwhile shows contained within Am I Being Unreasonable: a misfit duo comedy, like an AbFab thing; a quirky mystery about the new girl in the neighborhood; and pretty heavy drama about dealing with past tragedies. A single series can be capable of maintaining all of these, but AIBU’s approach is an imbalanced one, finding a kind of disappointingly shallow vibe for its comedy, doing the cheap method of cutting out relevant info for its mystery, and using the leftover runtime to stuff in flashes of its drama, which doesn’t serve it very well until the final episode of the season.

Nic (Daisy May Cooper) seems to be a dysfunctionally happy mum – y’know, human – raising her son Ollie (Lenny Rush) with hubby Dan (Dustin Demri-Burns), and getting by facing the day-to-day battles of fussy school mums, and missing cats, and crazy house cleaners and the like. She also has frequent flashbacks to the death of a friend, and likely a something-more, Alex (David Fynn), with these flashbacks becoming increasingly disruptive and with accompanying manifestations. She tells a bit of this to the new school mom she’s met, Jen (Selin Hizli), with the two bonding over being similar social outcasts and malcontents, trading barbs about everyone else in the neighborhood and becoming fast friends.

And there are the other details, like Jen secretly recording Nic making a confession; the fact the Dan seems to response very oddly to Jen; and that another one of Nic’s friends, Suzie (Amanda Wilkin), actually seems quite hostile towards her…

These aspects are part of the mystery and tragedy stories, and the first few episodes stack them up acceptably, though the show’s manner of including them without any context is perhaps a red flag for how AIBU will handle / resolve such threads. But what’s distracting separate from this is the sense of humor most often applied: our often-drinking, boisterous lead duo are meant to be likeable unlikeables to a degree – again, human – but there’s a line that gets crossed between picking on other people for their silly behavior, and getting very myopic with that humor and assuming that everyone surely sides with Nic and Jen about how silly others are, to the extent that it feels pretty mean-spirited at points. While I think there’s some nuance where the show tries to balance out by (very indirectly) suggesting that everyone has this myopathy, it nonetheless continues to punch down, and further confuses any level-headedness with its attempted mystery box setup, which uses backstory for twisty reveals, but undoes any of that humanizing in the process by turning said backstories into almost solely reveals.

And the application of those reveals, is, like a pet peeve: literally just cutting moments out of conversations we’ve previously seen so that we cannot understand the context until the cut footage is shown. That’s not a mystery, it’s just editing. And it requires quite a ridiculous bit of interplay when you consider the entirety of original scenes with the missing footage brought back in.

Both Cooper and Hizli have good comedic timing, and I think the idea of blending these different story types together is solid; the story is solid. But the presentation is only able to hold things together by withholding the guts of the story, and once that starts dropping – about halfway through the season – so did my interest.