Adapted from an acclaimed one-woman show, this powerful BBC series is feminism in practice, detached from the realm of think pieces and t-shirt slogans, writes Clarisse Loughrey.
Mood: Season 1
In order to indulge in television’s modern obsession with the “messy woman”—in Fleabag and all her disciples—we must often submit to a certain level of fantasy and delusion. It’s not that the “messy woman” isn’t authentic in her messiness, but that her troubles are self-contained in a way that makes her claims of everywoman status ring a little hollow. The “messy woman” of TV is mostly middle class. She’s frequently white. The tidal waves of her disastrous choices can only travel so far, before they crash against the walls of her own social and financial security.
Mood tries to look past the fantasy. Sasha’s (Nicôle Lecky) bad choices bite back. We meet her in the throes of a hangover, dazed and sweaty. Her phone has 44 missed calls to her ex, Anton—all from the night before. There’s a mortifying voice note to go along with that. More pressingly, her hands seem to be covered in soot. She’s already an unwelcome presence at home. Her mother (Jessica Hynes) thinks her ambitions in the music industry are a joke. Her stepfather (Paul Kaye) bemoans that “social media has convinced you that you’re all going to be the next Lisa Stansfield.” Sasha, quite rightly, points out that she has no idea who that is.
But, when the police turn up with questions about an arson at Anton’s home, Sasha’s family treat it as a final straw. She’s an adult now, they say, so they’re moving on and leaving her behind. Suddenly, Sasha finds herself homeless. That kind of messiness isn’t so cutesy and #relatable—it’s painful, unvarnished and devastatingly real. Mood is feminism in practice, detached from the realm of think pieces and t-shirt slogans, where ideas of choice and self-empowerment are met with material barriers.
By coincidence, Sasha meets Carly (Lara Peake), who has an air of blithe opulence. She takes Sasha to a party, hosted by a white, vacant-eyed influencer with Kardashian-lite, culturally appropriative braids and a debut single called “Reggaeton.” When Sasha inquires as to where Carly gets all her money, she’s bluntly told: “Use your fucking brain.” Carly is on DailyFans (a barely veiled reference to OnlyFans). She convinces Sasha to join her—performing in front of a webcam, taking increasingly specific requests. If a client asks Carly to bathe herself in strawberry milkshake, well, Sasha becomes the one holding the bottle.
Mood—like Fleabag, Chewing Gum, and Alma’s Not Normal before it—is an adaptation of a one-woman show, titled Superhoe, which Lecky performed to great acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2019. She’s not only the star and writer, but provides the show’s soundtrack, which she performs to camera throughout the series—Mood is a semi-musical, let’s say. Each song takes place in a dream world of Sasha’s own construction, where she’s able to vocalise the things that seem hardest to say out loud. Take her trip to the benefits office, where the claimants take the words hurled at them from behind the counter (“have pride in yourself… don’t blame us”) and spit them right back, in musical unison.
When it comes to art about sex work, there’s a typical fixation on whether something’s taken a pro- or anti- position on the issue. Although Mood, in its construction, is defensive of the rights and autonomy of sex workers, it’s also refreshingly disinterested in putting forth any kind of rigorous argument. It simply exists within the reality of sex work, rooted in the very complex question of how much independence can be found in the commodification of your own body. It also doesn’t shy away from the ways race can morph the nature of that conversation. When Carly is still trying to woo Sasha over, she queasily suggests that they label themselves as an “ebony and ivory” duo. There is no escaping the way her clients fixate on her Blackness.
Mood also cleverly draws a direct link between sex work and social media, the commodification of the body and the commodification of the soul. Anyone who creates an online profile and uses that profile for career advancement or monetary gain is, inevitably, packing up a part of themselves and putting it on sale.
“It’s like making free fucking money,” Carly says, “no different from putting bikini pics up on your Instagram.” A video of Sasha drunkenly rapping about chicken nuggets becomes a viral sensation. That should be a good thing, right? Mood’s not sure. The desire to be seen, by any means necessary, has its cost.
