Single drunk female: the series that manages to treat alcoholism in a comedy key

If you do not belong to that group of viewers who fear that viewing a product in black and white is a “cringe” practice, as those born after 2000 would say, then you will know that alcoholism was, at the exit of the cinema, the subject of comic curtains able to arouse the enthusiasm of an audience hungry for laughter and smiles. The first film that had the courage to tell the addiction to alcohol as one social plague destructive for the individual is seventy-seven years ago: it is called Lost days, a wonderful film that cannot be found on the platforms that, in addition to winning four Oscars, opened a gash that allowed the cinema to avoid shrugging and to admit that attachment to the bottle was (also) something to denounce and represent in its crudeness. From then on we saw alcoholism photographed from different angles, but never finding a double register capable of making us reflect and, at the same time, of making us arouse real empathy towards the protagonist. At least so far. Single Drunk Female, the new series conceived by Simone Finch (already behind Pappa and flab) available on Disney +in fact, has succeeded in the impossible, telling the story of an alcoholic girl who seems to have within her all the cynical and clumsy charge of Jess of New Girl.

The protagonist is called Samantha Fink, a nice 28-year-old who is fired from her job and arrested for a scene in public after a hangover. To avoid prison, she is forced to return to live with her mother in her hometown and start from scratch, putting a patch on the small traumas that led her to mature the addiction that has in fact compromised her life. Through a very refined double track, Single Drunk Female manages to tackle the theme of alcoholism, bringing us into the head of a girl who fights the problem that afflicts her with cynicism and irony, committing herself with all herself to find the path of sobriety and a harmony that she feels she has lost after the tragic death of the father.

Produced by Leslye Headland, co-creator of Russian Dolland Jenni Konner, co-showrunner and screenwriter of Girls, Single Drunk Female is a series capable of doing to laugh and to do reflect, making us understand what the human mind is able to do in order to anesthetize pain and stop thinking. The skill of Sofia Black-D’Elia, already seen in The night of And Your Honoris just the icing on the cake of a series that puts us in front of a protagonist towards whom we can only feel attachment, since alcoholism is only a small part of his existence, fueled by a multifaceted personality that tries to survive as best she can the disappointments and blows she has been forced to take. On the other hand, it would be unfair to think of alcoholics only in terms of addiction and the count of days of sobriety: behind the appearance there is a much more complex and jagged microcosm than Single Drunk Female tells with tones from sailed comedyavoiding – which is anything but obvious – the far too simple and reductive path of the cliché.

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