TV works in trends, and right now, Ireland is hot. Derry Girls, Normal People and Banshees on Inisherin have all been massive, mammoth mega-hits in the past few years and catapulted our island into the spotlight. Tourism has skyrocketed – everyone wants to visit the spots that served as the backdrop for the scene that made people cry, swoon or laugh.
It was only a matter of time, then, that someone made a major TV series set in Belfast, the epicentre of the Troubles.
If you went to Northern Ireland and did drama, at some point you were made to do a version of Romeo and Juliet but set in Belfast, and thankfully you can relive that horror in some small way with The Lovers, the latest attempt to ride the wave of the Irish Revival. Starring Johnny Flynn and Roisin Gallagher, the series is an attempt at creating a rom-com centred around the tension that arises when Westminster meets West Belfast.
Throughout six episodes we watch as ‘the lovers’ come together in a twist of fate and try to make it work. With a backdrop of Belfast in the 2020s, it makes for occasionally funny viewing. There’s a lot of comedy to be had from English people bumbling their way through the complicated history of Northern Ireland. The actors are charming, mostly, and the story is a nice ride.
Unfortunately, many of the jokes are made without an ounce of subtlety, so that not only do you hear the punchline coming a mile away, but when it finally lands, it keeps hammering it home until you’re begging it to stop.
Gallagher portrays Janet, a stereotypical East Belfast woman working in a supermarket with depression bad enough for a botched suicide attempt early on in the first episode, yet is miraculously cured once she meets Johnny Flynn’s Seamus, a self-absorbed broadcast journalist with his own well-masked Irish roots. Both characters are polar opposites, which is well-trod territory for rom-coms, but these two clash so violently that you wonder why they are besotted with one another apart from the fact that they fancy each other and that the script dictates that they must fall in love. They argue constantly about why they’re together, are constantly navigating each others’ insecurities and it often feels like you’re sitting in while your friend argues with their significant other. The amount of times Gallagher’s character says ‘fuck’ is unrealistic, even for Belfast, and while I usually defend every TV series’ right to using profanity as much as they wish, each ‘fuck’ comes across as a desperate attempt to portray ‘real’ Belfast dialogue. I’m not denying it happens, but after the 65th fuck it starts to come off as gratuitous.
The references to the Troubles feel mostly real and earned, however one scene in the last episode where the couple have a conflict about The Conflict nearly becomes comical in how both characters try and one-up each other on their own painful connection to it.
But despite all its faults, I’m glad The Lovers exists. If only to educate a wider audience on what Belfast is actually like today, as well as drop some facts about the history that too few English people are aware of. There’s nothing more exhausting that having to explain your country’s complicated history to people who had a massive hand in making it so complicated in the first place.
I wish I liked The Lovers more though. We’re smarter and funnier than this, but it will have to do for now.
Jessica Mercer 