For years, RTÉ's comedy department have been taking aim at the sweet spot. And last night, social media was almost unanimous in its verdict; Stefanie Preissner's Can't Cope Won't Cope is as close to the bull's-eye as they've ever gotten.
The drama-comedy – featuring Seána Kerslake and Nika McGuigan as two partying, puking and pulling Corkonians transplanted into Dublin life was trending on Twitter on Monday night – and with good reason. Despite the embarrassment of riches afforded to them by imports such as Girls, Fleabag, Pulling and My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Ireland's twentysomething women appeared delighted to have their own lives reflected right back to them.
The cacophony of Coppers, the unforgiving glare of daylight on the walk of shame, the flouro-halo of the pharmacist with the morning after pill; it was all there in technicolor (gory) glory.
Older women, meanwhile, appeared to enjoy that warming balm of nostalgia for vodka-fuelled nights and risk-free life on the lower rungs of the office ladder.
Still, it wouldn’t be an RTÉ comedy without a few naysayers also wading into the conversation, and sure enough there were plenty of armchair critics who... well, can’t cope.
"Was... I... supposed to laugh during that?" offered one (male) Twitter user. Come to think of it, it's interesting to note Twitter's rather neat gender divide on Can't Cope, Won't Cope. While so many young women were joyously relating to Danielle and Aisling's misadventures, many Twitter's male users seemed to be taking their merry time to warm to the subject last night.
There’s a hint of the same, wretched old conceit; that a show centring on the interiority of women, and female lives, must somehow be a “lesser” form of comedy.
One newspaper TV critic was particularly vehement in his disdain, comparing Can’t Cope to the Celtic Tiger crapshow that was The Big Bow Wow.
But there are many reasons why Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope isn’t likely to suffer that particular turkey’s fate. First and foremost, there’s its charming, singular tone.
Fine, there are fairly lights wrapped about fixie bikes, and cocktails necked out of jam jars. They say “like” a lot, like. Yet there’s something in the two-hander between Can’t Cope’s two leads that is hugely watchable. Even the supporting characters, from hapless colleague Lorraine (Sheila Moylette) to the unusually amenable taxi driver (Steve Blount) are solid.
And, like HBO’s Girls before it, there were hints in the opening two episodes that the girls’ friendship is more multilayered and complex than meets the eye. BFFs fo lyfe, or a slightly strange co-dependency? Time will tell.
Young women trying to find a place in the world is a hugely rich seam to mine, and no-one can say that female characters on TV are not having a moment right now.
There’s been the aforementioned, peerless Fleabag, the brilliantly cool Broad City and Sharon Horgan’s deft Catastrophe. More recently, we’ve enjoyed Amazon’s One Mississippi (brilliantly black), Better Things (sharp) and the forthcoming No Time To Waste on HBO (hugely likeable).
Is Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope set to enter this new all-star pantheon? Perhaps not. But with the right amount of nudging and nurturing from the right people, it’s a series that looks likely to find its feet in time.
The raw ingredients are present and correct, so maybe RTÉ will finally hit the sweet spot after all.
