Flowers review

A gloriously dark sitcom about depression and rage.

Flowers grows on you

True to its title, Flowers needed time to come in to full bloom. Channel 4 played out the first two episodes back to back last night, which is what broadcasters normally do when they want you to know they deem this or that drama or comedy to be An Important Event. In the case of Flowers though, it was a shrewd move.

Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt together to fall apart

This melancholic new comedy features a married couple at odds and jokes as twisted as the staircases. We meet the stars and wunderkind creator.

Flowers: Channel 4's peculiar, poetic comedy treat

Sad, strange and very funny comedy drama Flowers stars Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt.

Channel 4 are broadcasting this new sitcom every night this week. I don't like that approach. It's like a cowardly version of "bingeing". Netflix and boxsets allow you to binge in the proper sense: watching episodes without any breaks, conversation or daylight. That's how you properly binge-watch. Having a new episode each day must be terrestrial TV's version, but no - either bombard us so we can wallow like pigs, or drip-feed us an episode once a week, lending it some nice anticipation.

So does this new series merit the special treatment of a daily outing? On paper it should: it has an impressive cast (Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt are the stars) and it's a dark comedy about an eccentric family. The father has bungled his suicide and the mother is frantically cheerful, her manic persona hiding unhappiness and sexual frustration. Their household also contains two weird and warring adult children, a senile granny, and a boyish Japanese assistant.

Tonight, the family are thrown together to celebrate mum and dad's anniversary but the dark comedy never quite darkens enough and seems zany rather than black and clever.

Black comedy normally draws on a juxtaposition between disturbing subject matter and glib humour. Instead, Will Sharpe's six-part series - set in the shambolic rural home of the Flowers family (played by Julian Barrat, Olivia Colman, Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino) and screening every evening across the week - intermingles its knotty and desperately sad plot with the kind of comedy that litters our lives no matter what state they are in. The heartbreaking and hilarious result sets a new standard for situation comedies everywhere.

Flowers: Colman and Barratt come together to fall apart

This melancholic new comedy features a married couple at odds and jokes as twisted as the staircases. We meet the stars and wunderkind creator.

Flowers: Channel 4's peculiar, poetic comedy treat

Sad, strange and very funny comedy drama Flowers, feat. Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt, starts tonight on Channel 4...

Flowers is a clever, bleakly funny look at depression

Will Sharpe's Channel 4 series finds the humour in the grimness of life - and in a wonderfully unusual way.

Julian Barratt and Will Sharpe interview

The star of new Channel 4 comedy Flowers joins writer Will Sharpe to discuss their dark new series.