Ladhood sees Liam Williams’ painfully funny, semi-autobiographical sitcom back for a second season, mixing teenage laddishness with cutting insights into emotional inadequacy.
The confused man who has never really grown up has been rich territory for TV dramatists and comedians for decades, but rarely have they been so cruelly and brilliantly combined as here. Liam is an unhappy man in his thirties who inhabits a storyline that flips back to his teenage years (played superbly by Oscar Kennedy). Of course, Liam is hoping that by unpicking his teenage self, he can understand why he is miserable, but this comedy-as-therapy only goes to show that the adult Liam has learnt nothing. Same man-child, same mistakes. And it is hilarious.
Set in Leeds and stuffed full of telling period and contemporary references, this is laugh-out-loud comedy that is both wistful and melancholic.
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Ed Power in The Telegraph says Ladhood has a formula: “The Inbetweeners with an extra scoop of miserabilism. It’s funny, absurd and cruel – adolescence in a nutshell, really.” And he goes on: “rising above the status of mere light entertainment, it delivers an almost profound meditation on the agonies of growing up.” The Guardian’s Jack Seal rates the show highly and says that “maybe it has always been implicit in the best sitcoms that male emotional inadequacy is what causes lead characters’ plans to keep going awry; now it is explicit, to a delightfully cringeworthy extent.”
Season Two first shown in August 2021.
