The Letdown,
ABC-TV, Wednesdays, 9.35pm
Audrey (Alison Bell) is a first-time mum – she’s gone from a full-on busy, self-centred life to full-stop and selfless in just a few weeks.
Baby Stevie won’t sleep and mum trawls the streets in her family car trying to lull her to sleep and not encroach too much on the drug dealers’ territories!
The Letdown chronicles Audrey’s journey through the first few life-changing weeks of motherhood and against her better judgement she ends up joining the local parents’ group (you can’t call it a mothers’ group these days).
This is a group peopled by a cross-section of the stereotypical mums and hosted by a fairly blase, world-worn maternal health nurse – played to the hilt by Noni Hazlehurst.
The group includes Martha (Leah Vandenberg), a last-chance, stoic single mum; Ester (Sacha Horler), the workaholic mother in denial; Ruben (Leon Ford), her enthusiastic stay at home husband; Sophie (Lucy Durack), the overzealous perfectly groomed first timer; Barbara (Celeste Barber), the straight-talking mother of three; Jenna (Taylor Ferguson), the sweet-smiling, judgmental hippie and Georgia (Xana Tang) the headstrong millennial.
Star Alison Bell is one of the writers and is perfectly cast as a young woman coming to terms with what becoming a mum really means – at least in the early days.
This is a lot of fun and manages to straddle the line between actually being funny and going over the top. One of the ideas given a pilot show last year, The Letdown explores motherhood sympathetically with the humour based more on “insider jokes” than stereo-typical situations.
If you’ve had a baby recently or ever it’s not hard to relate to some of the things that Audrey and her friends face – and I defy any mum not to have met Noni’s character in some form or other over the years.
– Tania Phillips
