Sarah Kendall’s six-part comedy-drama opens with Sammy Cooper’s gilded Hampstead life collapsing when her husband drops dead mid-scandal and the taxman seizes everything. She bundles her bewildered teenagers onto the cheapest economy flight to Newcastle, where her chain-smoking mother Jean (Kerry Armstrong) still lives in the same fibro house and her brother Jim (Ben Mingay) runs a struggling gym. The local welcome is icy: the cop who once arrested her is now dating her best friend, and every shopfront remembers the night Sammy vanished at sixteen. Kendall keeps the tone brittle and farcical—funeral ashes in a biscuit tin, a council job shredding files—while letting the humiliation bite hard.
The second series jumps to 1989 flashbacks, shot on grainy 16 mm, showing pregnant 17-year-old Sammy hiding in a London squat while a Newcastle detective disappears back home. Present-day Sammy returns to Australia under police suspicion, her children marooned in a town that still calls her mother “the town bike”. The same faces recur—politician Chris (George Houvardas) now in uniform, Bev (Doris Younane) wielding Jim’s credit card like a weapon—until the final episode lands Sammy in court, secrets exhausted, with no fortune left to flee. Sky One’s closure shunted the second run to Sky Max in 2022; ABC kept its Thursday slot, but ratings slipped and Kendall announced cancellation on 28 November 2023.
Production Details
ABC TV / 2 Seasons / 12 Episodes / 2019 - Present
Created by: Sarah Kendall
Showrunner(s): Morwenna Banks, Sharon Horgan, Todd Abbott
Writer(s): Sarah Kendall
Producer(s): Nicole O'Donohue
Main Cast
Sarah Kendall as Sammy Cooper
Kerry Armstrong as Jean
Ben Mingay as Jim
Frazer Hadfield as Lenny
Maggie Ireland-Jones as Tess
George Houvardas as Chris
Alexandra Jensen as Abby
Diane Morgan as Fiona
Doris Younane as Bev
Christopher Stollery as Terry Harris
Matt Passmore as Dan
Trystan Go as Bo
