Usually, when you see a show about someone who’s getting sober, the person is actually trying to maintain sobriety. Even if they have setbacks, their desire to rebuild their lives is sincere. But in Single Drunk Female, the main character starts of resisting sobriety at every turn. It’s only when she gets the choice of sobriety or jail that she goes down that road, albeit reluctantly. Did we mention that this was a comedy?
Opening Shot: Scenes of New York City. A woman wobbles down the halls of her office, sipping from a water bottle that doesn’t have water in it.
The Gist: Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia) works at an entertainment website. Or, at least she did, until her boss (Jon Glaser) fires her for being drunk at work a few too many times. Sam doesn’t go quietly, though; she sits down at the conference table and refuses to leave. When her boss tries to call security, she wrestles the phone receiver from him and hits him in the face with it.
Despite being accused of reckless assault, she somehow doesn’t get prison time. She’s ordered to go to rehab and stay sober while she’s on probation. After what she thinks is a productive 30 days in rehab, she’s picked up by Carol (Ally Sheedy), whom she calls “Smother.” The plan is that Samantha moves back in with Carol in her Massachusetts hometown and does her probation there.
She goes to her probation officer, Gail Williams (Madison Shepard), who tells her that, besides cleaning up garbage on the side of the road, she’ll have to go to one AA meeting per day for 90 days. “What if I hit three meetings a day for 30 days?” she asks. At her first meeting, she meets Olivia (Rebecca Henderson), who has a bunch of sponsees, and seems to be the rock of that particular group. She also meets James (Garrick Bernard), who tells her that they slept together the previous Thanksgiving. Of course, Samantha has no memory of it.
Samantha goes to the local watering hole to hang out with her best friend/drinking buddy Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington); there, they see Brit (Sasha Compère) at her bachelorette party. Samantha is still upset that her former friend is now engaged to her ex Joel (Charlie Hall). She decides to start drinking to dull the pain, and her confrontation with Brit doesn’t go well; it ends up with her smashing her mother’s car, damaging the party bus Brit’s party was using, and a DUI charge.
Olivia bails her out and drives her to Carol’s house, where a pissed-off Carol decides to start charging rent, which means that Samantha needs to get a job. Also, Gail tells her that to stay out of jail, she’ll need to be sober for a year, do 250 hours of community service, take driver’s ed, and continue to go to meetings. Carol’s sympathy only goes so far; when Samantha reiterates what Olivia told her, that her alcoholism is a disease, Carol reminds her that the leukemia that killed her father was a disease.
Luckily for Samantha, Olivia has a sponsee who manages a supermarket and is looking for help. Her sobriety clock, displayed on screen, is now at 4 days.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Single Drunk Female, created by Simone Finch, lists Jenni Konner as one of its executive producers, and it certainly has the feel of her most well-known series, Girls. But, while all the characters have their funny moments in both shows, Samantha’s character flaws somehow aren’t nearly as grating as Hannah Horvath from Girls. There is also elements of Mom, especially in its later seasons.
Our Take: The most appealing part of Single Drunk Female is that it’s not trying to sugarcoat Samantha’s alcoholism. She’s certainly not a sympathetic figure in the show’s first couple of episodes; the only reason why she’s sober is that she’d go to jail otherwise and she seems to be fighting sobriety every step of the way. It seems like she’s setting herself up for failure. But along the way, she’s also finding out just what the hell she wants out of her life, and watching her go on that journey, with all its bumps, bruises and setbacks, is what drives the comedy as well as the drama.
Sofia Black-D’Elia plays Samantha with the right amount of flintiness; it’s hard to watch her fighting against the notion of sobriety. But there are just people who don’t want to be sober. What we hope is that, as the season goes along, her flintiness isn’t dulled by the connections she’s making with people like Olivia and James. Through the first three episodes, it feels like that’s the case; she wants to make amends to Brit, for instance, before she’s at that step, and it’s a disaster.
What also makes the series very watchable is that the supporting characters show their layers pretty much right away. Sheedy’s character Carol is especially interesting. Sure, she’s self-centered, but she’s also not giving her daughter a pass for poor behavior. At a certain point, she starts dating Bob (Ian Gomez), who’s in her book club, and he starts inserting himself into their dynamic pretty much right away. But he also isn’t just an over-emotional buttinsky. Felicia ends up objecting to just being Samantha’s drinking buddy. Even Brit has a lot more empathy for Samantha than vice versa.
Finch and Konner set up the world around Samantha so completely that they become a support system for her, even if she doesn’t know it or rails against it. But it also provides a lot of opportunities for story beats that won’t artificially extend Samantha’s probation and may make her even begrudgingly want to stay sober, even if we don’t see it for a couple of seasons.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Sam is four days sober; she wakes up and puts the on smock for the supermarket where she’s working.
Sleeper Star: Ally Sheedy manages to bring the same feisty acting style to Carol that she had in her biggest ’80s movie roles. But this award should also be given to Madison Shepard as Gail, the only TV probation officer we’ve seen that’s in a perpetually sunny mood.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Single Drunk Female gets off to a strong start with its first episode and gets better as it goes along, because it builds a world of nuanced characters right from its first scenes.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
