Asher Keddie is back as a ball of nervous energy in the new season of Strife

Strife ★★★★

The first season of this loose adaptation of Mamamia founder Mia Freedman’s memoir broke records as Binge’s biggest original series premiere, and fans will be pleased to know season two picks up shortly after the events of the finale.

Evelyn (Asher Keddie), who is struggling to get traction for her new website for women, Eve Life, discovered her deputy Christine (Maria Angelico) had defected to a start-up at their old workplace – a website aimed at the same audience as Eve Life.

Asher Keddie returns as lifestyle blogger turned website entrepreneur Evelyn Jones in Strife season 2.Credit: John Platt / Binge

That competitor, Whoman (the pronunciation is as silly as you think), has launched, amping up Evelyn’s already considerable anxiety. (If you’re coming into Strife fresh, it’s important to know the action is set around 2012, when websites such as these were something of a new frontier.)

Adding to that stress is the fact Eve Life isn’t making as much money as it needs to (perhaps she shouldn’t have rented the cinematically pleasing but over-the-top warehouse space their office is now in), not all of her employees are happy, and her home life is more complicated than ever.

Having given up her apartment to save money, she and her almost-ex-husband Jon (Matt Day) are trying out the “birdnesting” idea, in which children stay in the family home and both parents take it in turns to stay there with them. Even when Evelyn has her weekly turn though, her son Alex (Darcy Tadich) spends more time with his precocious new girlfriend, and her daughter Addy (Willow Speers) isn’t that keen on spending time with Evelyn either. Then there’s the fact that Jon has started dating again, as has Evelyn’s mum Ginny, a fabulously dry Tina Bursill, who gets a bigger role as Jon and Evelyn stay with her when the other is at home.

The staff of the fictional Eve Life website in season 2 of Strife.Credit: John Platt / Binge

While much of the action takes place in the Eve Life office, where Evelyn spends most of her time second-guessing herself, frantically searching for an investor and dealing with an online troll calling out her middle-class privilege and hypocrisy, this season focuses more to her personal life and anxieties around parenting, divorce, and even friendship in middle age, which Evelyn explores with her new therapist Sylvie (Mary Coustas).

And all this before Evelyn’s former employee Norma (Lucy Ansell) publishes her book Toxic Boss, a thinly veiled story about Norma’s time working at Eve Life.

Keddie is again terrific as the nervous ball of energy that is Evelyn (even if Evelyn is the type of character Keddie plays most of the time), and alongside the regular cast – Emma Lung as her best friend Lucy, Alex Dimitriades as Lucy’s slimy husband Daniel and Bryony Skillington, Bebe Bettencourt, and Rhys Mitchell among her staff – there are other big names this season, including Tim Minchin as a pretentious philosophy lecturer and Dylan Alcott as an even more pretentious new-age intimacy counsellor.

And while the “relatability” factor of Evelyn doesn’t quite cut it, the one-liners and wackiness throughout is tempered by more consequential matters, such as workplace diversity, social media and bodily autonomy.

Strife streams on Binge from May 8.

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