Gut-wrenching, real and a bit mean: Breeders is the best show about parenthood there is

BREEDERS ★★★★

March 18, 8.30pm, ABC and ABC iview

The title “Breeders” has a distinctly dystopian flavour, like a 1970s sci-fi about a nightmarish future where humanity has been depleted by powerful corporate interests. The actual show Breeders, on the other hand, is a comedy-drama about the struggles and pain of an ordinary couple trying to raise two children and keep themselves sane. Funnily enough, the real Breeders is a dystopia, too: a dystopia of the most terrifying kind because it’s real life.

Daisy Haggard as Ally and Martin Freeman as Paul in season four of Breeders, which has skipped ahead five years.

At the end of season three, the lives of parents Paul (Martin Freeman) and Ally (Daisy Haggard) had reached a point of ultimate crisis: their marriage apparently beyond the point of no return; Paul’s father having just been rushed to hospital with an overdose, leaving their daughter Ava traumatised.

Season four begins five years later, but the first episode cuts between “now” and “then”, with the new reality contrasting with events in the immediate aftermath of season three. As Paul and Ally’s family – kids and grandparents – gather for Christmas, we look back at how the separation proceeded, how things were bad, and then somehow started to get better.

But in the present day, Christmas is typically fraught as the new phase of parenthood for Paul and Ally brings a fresh set of problems and a bombshell that goes off in the middle of lunch. Three seasons of raising kids was traumatic enough: now the task is navigating those kids’ journey into adulthood, and it’s off to a hell of a start.

The cast of Breeders - from left - Alun Armstrong as Jim, Joanna Bacon as Jackie, Daisy Haggard as Ally, Martin Freeman as Paul, Stella Gonet as Leah, Patrick Baladi as Darren and Zoe Athena as Ava - is outstanding.

Breeders was originally sold as a comedy, with trailers highlighting the nuttiness and absurdities that emerge from all the frustrations of parenthood. And it is funny – there’s plenty of sharp comic dialogue and wit, courtesy of the strong comic pedigree of its creators: Freeman, Simon Blackwell (Peep Show and The Thick of It) and stand-up comedian Chris Addison, who also starred in The Thick of It and was an award-winning director on Veep.

But the background of Freeman, Blackwell and Addison gives a clue to Breeders’ true nature: they make comedies with hard, cruel edges, where laughs mingle with brutal and uncomfortable truths about human nature and the world we live in.

Breeders isn’t a cynical show, though. It lacks the laughs of The Office, but it also lacks the deep, pervasive gloom. What Breeders is, however, is a show so painfully and crushingly accurate that it can take your breath away. From the beginning, parents who watched it have felt the jolt of familiarity, the gut-churning recognition that very few shows achieve, and that inspires delight and discomfort simultaneously.

Zoe Athena as Ava and Oscar Kennedy as Luke in Breeders.

At this point of Paul and Ally’s journey, anyone who’s been through the break-up of a long-term relationship or seen it happen to people they’re close to will be tensing up at the progress of the split: the awkwardness, the attempts at civil conversation that are always on the edge of tipping over into explosive, recriminatory argument, the horrible loneliness of two people who have shared their lives now eating separate dinners in the same kitchen, backs to each other.

In this case, the separation is amicable. Indeed, Paul and Ally’s relationship improves hugely after they decide to split, but life continues to carry a brittle tension. In Breeders, there is as much importance in what isn’t being said as in what is, and every scene has a wealth of unspoken dialogue hanging in the air. But as painful as it is, as liable to bring tears to your eyes, Breeders is about hope and love. Spectacular performances – not just from stars Freeman and Haggard, but from supporting players, particularly Alun Armstrong as Paul’s troubled dad Jim – bring relentlessly real scripts to life. Characters who spend so much of their time fighting and expressing their frustrations with each other continually land on the bigger truth: that bonds of love will always cause pain, but it will always be worth it.

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