Bubbling with instant chemistry, two strangers meet in The Lovers. It’s not just watchable, it’s not just outrageously funny, it’s not just a touching love story, writes Amelia Berry – above all of that, it’s meticulously crafted storytelling.
Love, as they say, is a many-splendored thing. A great mystery, a chemical reaction, a spark of the divine in everyday life—when the written word was still just a clumsy tool for recording quantities of grain, people were already composing swooning songs, besotted poems, and grubby limericks (probably). So, you’d think after all that time, we’d have covered just about every love story imaginable. You’d be wrong.
In a new Sky Atlantic series, The Lovers dares to ask the question: what if a wanker fell in love with a curmudgeon? What if a smug prick fell in love with a miserable prick? What then?
Seamus (Johnny Flynn) is our smug prick. He’s a broadcaster, and after a few years in radio and the odd TV panel appearance (Surely, you’ve heard of Politics Hour? Politics Today? Political Notebook???), he’s finally getting his own current affairs TV show. The hitch? Due to some diversity quotas and whatnot, the network needs “This Sunday with Seamus O’Hannigan” to be filmed outside of London—specifically, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. After all, that’s where Seamus is from… or at least his mum is, sort of.
Which brings us to our miserable prick! That’s Janet (Roisin Gallagher). Since her husband left her, she’s been surviving on Geordie Shore and stolen chocolate bars from her job at the local supermarket. Her boss Philip (Game of Thrones’ brilliant Conleth Hill) really wants to help her out, but after he has to reprimand her for an incident with a co-worker (“So he said ‘Good Morning’ and you said… ‘suck a fuckin’ dick’?”), she decides that her best course of action is to kill herself.
Then, there’s the meet-cute. Seamus has managed to rile up some local teenagers after going off-script in a piece to camera—“Now to you or I… they may seem desperate, dangerous, criminal even! But these young men seek only one thing… hope.”
In his desperate scampering away, he loses his cellphone, clambers over a wall, and lands pretty much square on top of Janet—who is seconds away from blowing her head off with a shotgun. Seamus spends the night, partly to keep Janet from killing himself, and miraculously they kind of hit it off! Bubbling with instant chemistry, and each serving as a foil for the worst qualities in the other.
Now all that stands in the way of our Lovers is class, money, a few hundred (or thousand) years of colonial history… oh and Seamus’ hot celebrity girlfriend, Frankie (Alice Eve from Star Trek: Into Darkness and romcom Before We Go).
It’s a brilliant set-up for a comedy—turning the darkness up to 11, while still building an emotional core that’s engaging, real, and even a little uplifting. But then, the show’s writer has form for this kind of thing. David Ireland is known for his controversial and acclaimed plays, Ulster American and Cyprus Avenue (where a deranged unionist puts a beard and glasses on his granddaughter to make her look like Sinn Féin politician Gerry Adams—just to give you an idea of the vibe). If you pay attention, you can also see Ireland deliver two lines in the first episode of Derry Girls.
Director Justin Martin is no slouch either. Sharing Ireland’s background in theatre, he’s just come off directing Jodie Comer in Prima Facie on the West End, and before that he was busy winning a BAFTA for 2021 COVID relationship film, Together.
It’s a cliche to say that ‘X city is a character all itself’, but Martin and cinematographer Emily Almond Barr do an incredible job of bringing Belfast to life. Using signifiers of unionism and The Troubles to stand in for the changing relationship between our leads, the city goes from scarred, broken, and grim, to quaint and parochial, to open, thriving, and drenched in soft sunshine.
“I’ve lived in East Belfast for 15 years,” says location manager Scott Houston. “We do a lot of locations here. We double for London, we double for Birmingham, we double for all these other places. So it’s great when we get something that’s written about Belfast… that puts a bit of life and a bit of imagination back into the city.”
You might recognise Johnny Flynn as the handsome and charming Mr. Knightley from Emma., David Bowie in Stardust, or—for those with keen ears and impeccable taste TV dramedies—as the haunting voice behind the Detectorists’ soundtrack.
“At first, he comes across as arrogant,” says Flynn about his character Seamus. “But it’s actually a facility for hiding trauma—and I’ve enjoyed revealing this as the story goes on. It’s fun leaning into those slightly Alan Partridge facets of him and then taking them away and going, ‘Oh, he’s actually sweet’.”
Roisin Gallagher had a busy 2022, appearing in horror film Mandrake, TV movie St. Mungo’s, and series The Dry—hailed by The Guardian as ‘an Irish Fleabag’. The Lovers feels like it could be a real breakthrough for her.
“I didn’t feel like I had to understand a different psyche,” Gallagher told The Irish Times about preparing for her role in The Lovers. “For me, tapping into Janet was about finding the similarities with my own life. Working class, small community, limited resources and opportunities. A sense of good enough. You’ve a job, a roof over your head, why would you go looking for anything else? I know who she is.”
The Lovers is that rare kind of TV series. It’s not just watchable, it’s not just outrageously funny, it’s not just a touching love story—above all of that, The Lovers is a meticulously crafted piece of storytelling, deeply rooted in a particular sense of place, character, and perspective. It’s not afraid to get bleak (see above), which will certainly put a few people off, but if you can stomach it, then The Lovers is a series with a lot to recommend it.
