Can aerobics change your life? Rose Byrne’s unlikely comedy series thinks so

Physical ★★★★
Apple TV+

Adrift in a sea of AM car radios, secret binge eating and aimless pretence, Sheila Rubin is a wife and mother who is hanging on by a thread. Life seems like a slow-motion billboard of California beach hunks who drift into the frame like walking pornographic fantasies, with the brutal sting in the tail that we are forced to see them through the prism of a slightly chunky lady holding a box of donuts.

Rose Byrne as Sheila Rubin in Physical.Credit: Apple TV+

Sheila has a husband and a daughter and, despite the postcard perfection that many television programs might like to wheel out alongside the freedom and reinvention that came with the 1970s, her spoken dialogue and inner monologue are basically having an argument. The good old days, it seems, maybe weren’t so good.

Set in 1980s San Diego, Physical is a dark comedy following Sheila (Rose Byrne) through her “journey of self discovery via aerobics”. The first episode dials the action back to the 1970s perhaps to give the audience a bit of tough love. After all, if neon leotard and ’80s music is this story’s happily ever after, then the leadup to that can only be worse, right?

Physical comes from the department of comedies born in unlikely places. Think sitcoms in dental surgeries or funeral parlours or cop shops. Typically they are places mired in anxiety and fear, but in the hands of a great writer like Annie Weisman, truly, nothing should be off limits.

Weisman’s previous credits include Desperate Housewives and Suburgatory and you can feel subtle echoes of both here. There is a sort of subcutaneous misery that permeates Sheila’s life. An unspoken sadness that is wrestling with itself inside her, waiting for the spark that will ignite meaningful change.

Physical explores Sheila’s (Rose Byrne) ‘journey of self discovery via aerobics’.Credit: Apple TV+

Physical is not a sitcom in the traditional sense. It is dark and subtle, but at times it plays in loud, excruciating notes. It leans back into the very chic 1970s with the kind of production design that might live in a Mad Men sequel, but somehow bends the retro fantasy into a retro nightmare. Were we ever really this unfashionable? Was life ever really this awful?

It is also a beautiful character study, particularly when Sheila’s inner monologue and her lived life get into arguments. In lesser hands it might unravel a little, but Byrne is a gifted actress and brings the life-weary struggle of the everywoman to Sheila’s hanging-on-by-willpower-and-sheer-grit world. Rory Scovel, as husband Danny, is great too. A douche, but not a wholly hopeless one.

Physical is a love letter to everyone who thinks they could be living the life, but is somehow just managing to get by. Everyone who knows they should be jogging around the neighbourhood but is, instead, sitting in a drive-through queue in the belief that one last cheeseburger can solve today’s pile of problems.

Physical seeks to make you laugh, and to exploit your most ludicrous fantasies, but it also wants to stab you in the neck - joyfully - in the process. Perhaps, too, it nods to those of us who think that while today is falling to pieces, tomorrow will be the day we somehow get it all together. As impossible as that might seem. In a post-COVID-19 world, such a notion is quite unexpectedly relatable.

“They sold out?” Sheila asks when she realises that her local dance studio has closed, following the tanning salon and the travel agency down the economic plughole. “Everyone does eventually,” the landlord replies.

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