The show with the edgiest ‘meet-cute’ in romcom history

The Lovers, Binge/Foxtel from September 7
★★★★

There’s much to love about this brilliantly spiky British romcom, but top of the list is Roisin Gallagher. The 38-year-old Belfast native plays Janet, a misanthropic supermarket worker, and she is so good you’re likely to find yourself wondering where she has been all your life (answer: mostly supporting and guest roles, apart from a recent lead in The Dry, a dark comedy about an alcoholic woman trying to embrace sobriety in Dublin).

Roisin Gallagher as Janet, a foul-mouthed supermarket worker, in the rom-com The Lovers.Credit: Binge/Foxtel

Janet is on the brink of blowing her brains out in her postage stamp-sized backyard when she is rudely interrupted by Seamus O’Gallagher (Johnny Flynn), a current affairs presenter from London who has been flown over to Belfast to satisfy his employer’s regional production requirements.

He’s scaling her rear wall in a bid to escape a gang of violently inclined unemployed yoofs, apparently incensed at being described on camera by him as unemployed yoofs prone to violence. Well, you can’t be it if you don’t see it, and all that.

Every romcom demands a meet-cute, but few have embraced gallows humour with quite so much grim abandon.

There’s a near-instant attraction between the pair, but he’s understandably wary when he catches sight of her suicide note, “boo f—ing hoo” scribbled in chalk on a blackboard on her kitchen wall. And she’s none too impressed by his all-too evident air of self-importance, or his cowardice.

Seamus (Johnny Flynn) is a self-important journalist who meets his match in Belfast. Credit: Binge/Foxtel

Inevitably, though, the draw becomes too strong to resist, and they make an informed decision to have an affair with very specific boundaries. It can only happen in Belfast, when he’s over for work. It has a finite time span, determined by the length of his assignment. His actress girlfriend (Alice Eve) mustn’t find out. And he must not leave said girlfriend for Janet.

Of course, nothing goes quite according to plan, including their attempts to consummate the relationship. But the delay is deeply gratifying.

On the basis of the three episodes available for preview, The Lovers ticks plenty of romcom boxes, but rarely feels formulaic. Like that meet-cute, it takes the format and gives it a good old shake, and frequently surprises with where it goes.

There’s honesty and maturity in creator David Ireland’s writing, there’s a good old dash of British bedroom farce, nods to the lingering sectarian divisions at play in Northern Ireland, and hilarious digs at the media’s obsession with itself (Seamus has a rude awakening when he realises he’s not actually famous in the way Janet’s favourite reality TV stars are).

Flynn, who was a dangerously brooding presence in the 2017 indie film Beast opposite Irish singer-actor Jessie Buckley, and an unconventionally blond Mr Knightley to Anya Taylor-Joy’s Emma in the 2020 film of Jane Austen’s novel, does a fine line in fragile male ego. But it’s Gallagher who really motors the series along.

Her Janet is feisty, funny, fierce, equal parts impossible and impossible not to fall for.

There are echoes in all this of the dynamic between Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan in the superb Catastrophe. But that should be taken purely as a term of endearment.

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