Wellmania, Netflix review: Aussie comedy has a cracking go at escaping Fleabag's shadow
If there hadn’t have been a Fleabag or an I Hate Suzie then Wellmania (Netflix), an Australian series with a love/hate female lead, would have been rendered an instant classic. The story of an Aussie journalist making waves in New York as a food critic, it goes all in on making its heroine unlikeable. Prior to Fleabag (or possibly Weeds or Sex and the City, depending on your reference library) this was challenging, uncharted territory. But a series as pioneering as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s looms large in the memory, and Wellmania exists in its shadow. It’s good, just not as good.
Liv Healy (Celeste Barber) begins the series – which is adapted from the memoir by journalist Brigid Delaney – in the back of an Australian ambulance, before we cut back to the splendours of her life in New York. She’s been living the life of a 20-something but she’s nearly 40. She’s overdone it, having made a name for herself as someone who’s last to leave every party. When she gets offered a role as a judge on a TV cookery show, it’s everything she wants and she can’t wait to get started. But then she pops back home to Sydney for her best friend Amy's (JJ Fong) birthday party – and promptly folds.
Cue eight half-hour episodes of Liv desperately trying to get back to New York for her big TV break but being constantly thwarted in ever more ludicrous ways: her bag is stolen, along with her green card, then she can’t pass a medical to get another one, so she enrols in a drastic detox involving rectal hosing and powdered shakes and so on. She constantly falls off the wagon, clambers back on it again, enrols in her brother’s gym, sweats a lot and keeps passing out.
Throughout it all Liv is self-centred, self-destructive and just plain self-ish. She gets away with it because she’s funny. She is particularly unpleasant to her own family, in the form of her delightful mother Lorraine (Genevieve Mooy) and her brother Gareth (Lachlan Buchanan). He’s about to get married and could do with a little help, and yet Liv can think of nothing other than what a judging slot on Banquet Royale could mean for her career. Liv is all about Liv.
But Barber, an Aussie comedian, is dynamite in the lead, an astonishing combination of one-woman disaster flick and flashes of vulnerability that, indeed, reminds you of Waller-Bridge in Fleabag in the very best way. There’s an element of TV watching-as-rubbernecking to Wellmania that makes it supremely addictive. Yes, when Liv’s personality flaws are revealed to be founded in childhood trauma, it’s a predictable trope. Yes, there’s no doubt that were she a real character her family would have washed their hands of her years ago. But equally, a real-life Liv Healy would be someone you’d want to watch on TV. So it is with her fictional counterpart: if you're reading this and you haven’t heard of Fleabag, fill your boots.
