Freya, a 34-year-old Canadian painter, moves to north London to live with her suddenly serious boyfriend, Abe, and realises she needs a round-the-clock carer that agencies won’t supply. She poaches her best friend Jo, a divorcée who still sleeps with her ex and has never cared for anything larger than a houseplant, and pays her with the council Direct Payment scheme. Kyla Harris co-created the story with writer-director Lee-Getty and plays Freya with a sardonic turn that upends the ‘life-affirming’ template; her real tetraplegia informs the details shown on screen, from carers turning up four hours into the night shift to the sudden horror of a dropped phone on a bathroom floor. The room-mate tension is the comedy engine: Jo’s alcoholised one-night stands are soundtracked by Freya’s doorbell camera while Abe keeps spreadsheets of wheelchair repairs. Elena Sauret lets Jo’s good intentions slide into sabotage, and in the best episode of the first season, she turns a routine hospital appointment into a citywide pub crawl. Darren Boyd plays Abe’s patience with the brittle smile of a man realising he has two partners he can’t move out of. The language is rough and intimate: the first line is Freya saying, ‘I can’t feel my clitoris anymore’, and the jokes never cushion the fear of losing independence. The show was commissioned by the BBC after Channel 4 lost interest in 2022, and was filmed in and around Stoke Newington by Nick Collett with wheelchair steadicams built from gimballed mobility aids. The second six-part run, finished in November 2025, premiered in February 202: the opening episode starts with Freya waking up to Jo’s wedding ring in her champagne glass and ends with both women hiding from social services after a bothed hoist transfer. The critical notes are uniform: the series is the first to write disability like a sex-and-flatmates sitcom rather than a problem to solve and it is the funniest thing the BBC has put on the schedule in years.
Production Details
BBC Two / 2 Seasons / 10 Episodes / 2024 - Present
Created by: Lee Getty, Kyla Harris
Showrunner(s): Rebecca Murrell, Alex Smith, Ash Atalla
Writer(s): Lee Getty, Kyla Harris, Jess Bray
Producer(s): Inez Gordon
Cinematography: Will Hanke
Main Cast
Kyla Harris as Freya
Darren Boyd as Abe
Elena Saurel as Jo
Edward Bluemel as Levi
Sally Phillips as Jane
Aasiya Shah as Ty
Emma Sidi as Olivia
Hanako Footman as Olyvya
Sophie Thompson as Bean
Helen Schlesinger as Dr Roscia
Jason Fernández as Dani
Ania Marson as Doreen
