New Aussie show Strife is Asher Keddie at her absolute best

Asher Keddie fans who first fell in love with her thanks to her incredible performance in Love My Way are in for a treat with her latest show.

Fans who first fell in love with Asher Keddie thanks to her incredible performance in Love My Way are in for a treat with her latest show.

Keddie’s character in Strife, now streaming on Binge, has more than a few shades of Love My Way’s most complex character, Julia Jackson, brought to life so vividly by Keddie in her star-making breakthrough role in the early noughties.

Both are upper-middle-class working mums, deeply flawed and highly stressed, tearing around Sydney’s eastern suburbs trying to balance their lives – all while on the near-constant verge of a nervous breakdown.

Keddie as Evelyn (right) with her workmates in Strife. Photo: Kane Skennar / BINGE

But Strife’s Evelyn Jones, mag editor-turned-creator of a start-up women’s website, is actually based on a real-life person: author and creator of the Mamamia media empire, Mia Freedman.

As one panellist acknowledged during the Q&A at last night’s Sydney premiere, Freedman is something of a controversial figure nowadays, having weathered several public backlashes in the past decade.

Strife is loosely based on Freedman’s 2017 memoir Work Strife Balance, and rather than being a Freedman hagiography, it uses the basics of her life circa 2012 – leaving the money and prestige of women’s mags to start a new website from the ground up – to create a new, compellingly flawed character in Evelyn.

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It’s Keddie doing what she does best: Flawed, stressed, compelling characters. Picture: Binge

The pace is rapid-fire, chaotic and frequently hilarious, as Evelyn veers from meetings with divorce lawyers to problematic editorial meetings to disastrous live television appearances.

Those work scenes provide some of the show’s biggest laughs: Evelyn and her young, mostly female team, packed into a tiny office and voraciously chasing clicks while desperately trying to appease their few advertisers. Stories about war, oil spills, international relations? Boring. “I had an orgasm while giving birth?” Write it now – even if you have to make it up.

Those at last night’s Sydney premiere were shown the first two episodes of the series; it’ll be interesting to see where director Stuart Bowen and showrunner Sarah Scheller take Evelyn over the remainder of the season.

With Keddie in the driver’s seat, it’s sure to be compelling – even if she does run a few red lights and hit the odd cyclist.

All eight episodes of Strife are available to stream on Binge from today.

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