Mumsnet beware, Daisy May Cooper is back to her abrasive best

“Am I being unreasonable?”, or AIBU for short, is the name of an infamous forum on the website Mumsnet, where parents can share their potentially controversial opinions. Now the ubiquitous phrase has lent its name to a primetime comedy - and a bracingly bold one, too. I look forward to Mumsnetters furiously debating its merits in posts beginning “AIBU or is AIBU a bit…”

Co-written by and starring Daisy May Cooper, who won a mantelpiece full of Bafta awards for rural mockumentary This Country, Am I Being Unreasonable? (BBC One) returns to the same Cotswolds setting - only for this whip-smart, grown-up comedy, Cooper has swapped teenage tracksuits for swishy coats and Smeg wine coolers. 

The six-parter follows Nic (Cooper), an unhappily married mother-of-one - mainly because she’s privately mourning somebody she can’t speak about. So far, she’s managed to keep her dark secret hidden. When she spots a kindred spirit on the school run in Jen (co-creator Selin Hizli, Cooper’s real-life best friend), they instantly form a tight alliance. Can Nic trust this enigmatic new arrival?

Cooper has described the series as “genre-less” and it does resist categorisation. It flips from romance to thriller to horror, sometimes within the same scene. It’s traditional for critics to carp that it doesn’t quite succeed at any of them but that would miss the point of this endlessly surprising series. 

Just when the show looks like it’s going to be about obsessive female friendship, it whisks the rug away. Nic’s grief, when revealed in flashback, provides a gut punch, while beneath all the mischief lies a poignant love story. Jump-scares jangle the nerves. Unreliable witnesses abound. 

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