The Dry, series 2, review: spiky Irish drama finds the funny side of addiction
I wasn’t sure about the first series of The Dry (ITVX), and with hindsight that’s because it featured Ciarán Hinds having sex against a wheelie bin. Once you have seen Captain Wentworth humping away al fresco, in his 70s, it is not something you can unsee.
But I rewatched the series recently, this time prepared for Hinds with his trousers down, and found it to be funny, melancholic and filled with lovely performances. Now it’s back for a second series, with more of the same.
The Dry is set in Ireland, and it’s about a family’s relationship with alcohol. These two things are linked, according to Hinds. “For many years, we were a priest-ridden country, steeped in the notion of sin. So the impulse to drink and to let go is deep in the psyche,” he told this newspaper last week.
That sounds quite dark, but it’s a theme buried way below the surface of this comedy-drama. The show is led by Roisin Gallagher as Shiv, a recovering alcoholic who we meet again on her 36th birthday. In the gap between this series and the last, Shiv’s mum, Bernie, has also admitted to a drink problem and joined her daughter at Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bernie (Pom Boyd) is a bit of a nightmare, and not just because she enjoys the limelight at AA meetings a little too much. She has moved a new boyfriend, smug teetotaller Finbar (Game of Thrones’ Michael McElhatton), into the family home, relegating husband Tom (Hinds) to the garden shed. The house is pretty crowded because all three children live at home: Shiv, who is back on the wagon; Caroline (Siobhán Cullen), a surgeon recently split from her fiancé after Shiv ruined their engagement party; and Ant (Adam John Richardson), whose embrace of alcohol and drugs is tipping over from hedonism into problem territory.
You need to have watched series one to fully understand these characters, so start at the beginning if you’re tempted. It’s not a laugh-out-loud sitcom, but a more thoughtful offering in which the behaviour rings true even when it’s absurd. The family is dysfunctional but, if your own family’s idiosyncrasies were to be turned into a television series, wouldn’t they also come across as a tiny bit mad?
Writer Nancy Harris has produced a script that switches with ease from tender to spiky, anchored by a shining performance from Gallagher, who deserves a bigger stage (she was also in last year’s Sky comedy-drama The Lovers). Gallagher makes Shiv feel completely real, as a woman in her 30s struggling to stay sober – and that’s before her mother announces to the AA meeting: “It’s Shiv’s 36th birthday. How did that happen? Thirty-six? I mean, that’s nearly 40.”
