For Miri (Haggard), life on the outside is just as perilous as prison
Miri can’t possibly deserve her mon-
strous reputation. Timid and fragile,
she radiates the benign dizziness of a
’90s Lisa Kudrow character— Haggard
even looks a bit like Kudrow—if that
flaky woman-child were also a recently
incarcerated local pariah. Miri trips
over the usual ex-con hurdles: awk-
ward job interviews, tough reunions,
check-ins with a distracted parole of-
ficer (Jo Martin’s Janice). But the show
is more about the unique nightmare
of being hated and misunderstood by
everyone around you. Miri could eas-
ily have allowed the ordeal to break
her, though in a rare insight Janice ob-
serves, “I deal with broken women all
day, and you? You’ve got it all.”
Miri is a scapegoat, defined by what
others project on her. That’s a difficult
portrait to paint in under three hours
while juggling elements of comedy
and crime drama, but Back to Life (pre-
miering Oct. 6) smartly surrounds Miri
with distinctive secondary characters:
her distant mom (Geraldine James),
obsessive conservationist dad (Rich-
ard Durden), a love interest (Adeel
Akhtar) with secrets of his own. What
Fleabag did for one wounded human
being, this worthy successor does for a
scarred community.
EvEn bEforE it dominatEd thE
Emmys, Fleabag was bound to loom
large over Showtime’s Back to Life.
Aside from sharing a pair of executive
producers, Harry and Jack Williams,
both British imports cast their creator-
stars as women who’ve been deemed
terminally unlovable. Both have six-
episode seasons built around those
characters’ secrets. They share witty,
concise scripts and defining fascina-
tions with ugly emotions: grief, loneli-
ness, guilt, shame, self-hatred.
The big difference between Back
to Life protagonist Miri Matteson
(Episodes’ Daisy Haggard, in her
writing debut) and Phoebe Waller-
Bridge’s indelible Fleabag is the
grave and public nature of Miri’s
predicament. After serving 18 years in
prison for a crime she committed as
a teenager, she returns to the seaside
town where she grew up—a place
where everybody knows everybody,
and most see her homecoming as a
threat to public safety.
It takes a while for Haggard and
co-writer Laura Solon to fill in the
backstory. By then, you’re likely to
have reached two hard-to- reconcile
conclusions: that whatever happened
must’ve been devastating, and that
TELEVISION
Love Fleabag? Meet Miri
By Judy Berman
TimeOff Reviews
BACK TO LIFE: SHOWTIME
A GOOD SOURCE OF
FIBER AND A GREAT
SOURCE OF CRUNCHY
DELICIOUSNESS.
