Lip Service: Season 2
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[rating: 4/5]
When this lesbian drama, produced by BBC Scotland, made its belated debut on Australian television screens late last year, thanks to Foxtel’s Showcase channel, I’ll admit that I was instantly sucked in. Unlike The L Word, its US-produced dramatic forerunner, Lip Service is a drama that feels much more real and true to everyday life, not to mention much less contrived or stylised, than its American counterpart. In that sense, it has a lot in common with the original British miniseries, Queer as Folk, and its American counterpart, though lesbian characters admittedly played a reduced role in both shows.
Season one of Lip Service established a cast of resonant, interesting characters, some of them gay and a couple of them not, all going about the hectic, oftentimes confounding and disappointing, business of living out their 20s in Glasgow. The second season builds on the immense promise of the first and delivers on all counts. Creator Harriet Braun’s writing is empathetic, warm and utterly relatable.
The main characters from the show’s first season are all here – architect, Cat, and her girlfriend, policewoman Sam, as well as Cat’s ex, the troubled photographer, Frankie, Cat’s best friend and aspiring actress, Tess, and Cat’s straight brother, Ed, a just-signed writer of science fiction novels. Many of the plotlines, not to mention the tense love triangle between Cat, Sam and Frankie, that were left dangling at the end of season one are continued in these six episodes, though none is ever resolved entirely, presumably in anticipation of a third season.
Reviewing the second season of the show, as such, is impossible to do without revealing some major, unexpected plot developments and thereby ostensibly ruining the viewing experience for those who have yet to watch it. Character-wise, the addition of the sensible but dryly humorous Australian doctor, Lexy, played by Anna Skellern, proves a good one, and the development of Natasha O’Keeffe’s bit-part character, Sadie, into a leading role is also an interesting gamble that proves surprisingly successful.
Be warned, however, that there’s at least one massively unexpected storyline that unfolds with brutal speed and no forewarning. Don’t watch episodes two and three without doing two things: preparing yourself for the loss of a main character and having either a stiff drink or tissues to hand. Given its subject matter, this show could have been trite and exploitative, but it is thankfully never anything less than well acted and supremely engaging. Like many British dramas, however, the season consists of only a handful of hour-long episodes that leave the viewer wanting more. At this point, no third season has been commissioned, but here’s hoping the BBC both recognises how highly the show rated, and how many loyal viewers it has, and decides to forge ahead with one.
– Heidi Maier.
