“An Irish Fleabag”, “Marian Keyes Meets Normal People”. When Element’s Dublin-set dramedy The Dry (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) debuted last year on UK streaming service, Britbox, it was heralded as a mish-mash of familiar influences. Some 12 months later, Nancy Harris’s tale of a woman struggling with alcoholism comes to RTÉ still a little unsteady on its feet.
Siobhán – annoyingly, the script insists we refer to her as “Shiv” – is a 30-something alcoholic who returns to Ireland from London following the death of her grandmother and after one encounter with the bottle too many. She is played by Belfast actor Róisín Gallagher, who gets the aspirational Dublin accent right yet doesn’t sell us on Siobhán – sorry “Shiv” – as a woman all at sea.
As alcoholics go, she seems suspiciously well put together. The real calamities are the rest of her family. Her father, played with a wink by Ciarán Hinds, is a jovial sort having a secret affair with his acupuncturist; her mother (Pom Boyd) is an oblivious fusspot who nags at Shiv to get her life together even as hers falls apart.
Also back in Shiv’s life is a toxic former boyfriend (Moe Dunford), who looks like a refugee from the late 1990s Dublin singer-songwriter scene. He slinks around to the family home, wearing a smirk, stubble and annoying “support slot at Whelans” hat and tries to tempt his ex off the wagon with an expensive bottle of red wine. “You’re more fun when you’re drinking,” he ventures.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
He’s a nasty, manipulative sort. And yet The Dry expects us to react with shock when Shiv decides to dial Alcoholics Anonymous rather than join him on his taxi to Blotto-ville.
The Dry, which RTÉ is airing in two-episode chunks, is better at picking at Dublin’s social foibles. An AA meeting on the Southside is a riot of Yummy Mummies. Everyone drinks Nespresso; one of the regulars brings rice crispie buns from Avoca.
But then Siobhán’s old teacher turns up and blames her one-time unruly student for her spiral into addiction. “That’s what you get for going to a fancy meeting on the Southside,” points out Shiv’s sister (who has problems of her own in the form of an exercise-obsessed boyfriend).
The Dry works best in its portrayal of Irish familial dysfunction. There is a funny scene, for instance, in which the dead pigeon Siobhán has been saving as an art project is accidentally brought out at mealtime. Alas, it ultimately has neither the whipsmart crackle of Fleabag nor the melodramatic punch of Normal People. Here is a comedy about addiction that you’ll find all too easy to give up.
