Such Brave Girls is 2025’s deranged show of the summer “>
Hulu
Kat Sadler created Such Brave Girls, her very funny, very dark A24 sitcom, in early 2020 when she was committed and recovering in a mental health ward. A conversation with her sister, actor Lizzie Davidson, who was then tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, made her laugh at the bleakness of their respective lives. That rock bottom despair became the fuel for her latest show that’s streaming on Hulu and recently returned for a second season. It stars two sisters stumbling through a lightly fictionalized life of hardship and abandonment, desperately looking for an escape hatch though one ill-fated decision at a time. Bypassing the “sadcom” trend, as well as the cozy hugging-and-learning shows prevalent elsewhere, Such Brave Girls stands alone as the most deranged comedy I’ve seen in years.
Sadler plays Josie, a semi-closeted lesbian who’s trapped in a loveless relationship with her boyfriend Seb and daydreams of meeting a woman and getting committed to escape him. Her sister, a man-obsessed kids entertainer named Billie, is quick to shatter her illusions. “Maybe she’ll spot me across the room and realize I’m the love of her life,” Josie says, eyeing up someone at the bar in an early scene that showcases their savage banter. “Don’t think so,” Billie replies. “Sometimes me and mum forget you’re there when you’re standing right next to us.” Their mom is Deb (played by Louise Brealey) who is so focused on marrying her sheepish, wealthy boyfriend Dev to end the family’s money worries that she barely registers her wayward adult daughters. (“At what point do you think the maternal instinct kicks in?” Josie asks at one point.) Their family mantra is “ignore, repress, forget.” Ted Lasso wouldn’t last a minute in this world, but Deb would probably try to marry him if it meant she could live in a bigger house.
Such Brave Girls is 2025’s deranged show of the summer “>
Such Brave Girls centers around two sisters, Josie and Billie.
Hulu
Sadler’s writing takes the British tendency for self-deprecation and pushes it to the extreme. In interviews, she’s said that Josie is “fundamentally desperate for attention” and that Sadler uses the negative ways she views herself as building blocks for the character. “I didn’t want to have a character that you feel sorry for,” she said in a recent interview. “I didn’t want to write a show that said, ‘Let’s talk about my experience and feel sorry for me’.”
It would be hard to feel sorry for anyone in Such Brave Girls. This is a show where women are free to be grotesque schemers, always on the look out for a situation they can manipulate in their favor. For much of the second season Billie is seeing an older man she thinks is “probably about 70 but he could be a 50-year-old that’s really tired,” though it’s ultimately revealed that she isn’t his sugar baby, he just pays her to leave him alone. Abortion and suicide are also mined for jokes with little cushioning in place for viewer sensitivity, while feminism is dismissed as an unnecessary road block in the pursuit of securing long-term happiness. While these jokes might feel jarring in the current sociopolitical moment, they do give the show a sense of rawness, all vanity and pretense removed in the pursuit of showing these characters at their realest.
Watching Josie, Billie and Deb flail at happiness, each of their concocted schemes more alienating than the last, might not make them likeable heroes but it does make for great TV. Not everyone needs to be virtuous and redeemable and Such Brave Girls celebrates women for being unsavory. That’s brave.
