We've (wife+I) watched a couple episodes of Out Of Her Mind, a new drama starring Sara Pascoe. I ended writing quite a lot talking about it elsewhere and thought it was enough to turn into a blog post.
Sara is a comic I have enjoyed watching, even seen live as audience for a UK TV Play show with her and Katherine Ryan (who I'm also a fan of).
I won't spoil specifics of the plot but I will talk about it's narrative style and the character traits easily visible from those two episodes of specific characters.
The show is very loose with its fourth wall breaking - Sara flips between character and show-aware monologuing "self", sometimes quite freely and without notice. This is both refreshing and a bit disconcerting. Then there's this other space which seems like a mix - like a physical representation of an inner headspace maybe, a canvas to play out thoughts and flashbacks for context, but with a design ethic that's (I guess) supposed to be indicative of her mental health/situation.
This out-of-world space (and yet also used to move things along sometimes) is also used to insert odd bits of real education (you know how Channel 4's Naked Attraction slips in these little facts, sometimes with drawings?). In-show things and character and processing happens there. Overall, the show focusses mostly on family relationships so far - one old event for her and the family reactions and her trauma from it (after many years) is what her story is based on. There's ongoing verbal abuse from at least one person portrayed though the show has barely named it as such yet.
We chose this instead of getting further into Adult Material, which was a bit intense for a just-before bedtime watch and was more graphic about the abuse it deals with (in the adult entertainment industry, specifically porn at least for starters).
We'll be watching more of it (Sara).
