Fans Of ‘Fleabag’ Should Check Out ‘Frayed’ On HBO Max, A Show That’s Unfairly Gotten Lost In The Shuffle

This question goes out to my fellow ’80s teens and tweens: if you were able to go back and speak to your younger self, how long do you think it would take to explain the content streaming environment of 2021? For those of us whose parents didn’t spring for cable or who lived in another country with different programming, TV wasn’t really a matter of choice: everyone watched the same four or five watercooler shows; every miniseries truly was an event; and if you woke up too early on Saturday morning, you’d just suffer through the Farm Report while you waited for cartoons to start. So if the biggest problem with our current world of streaming is that there are so many choices that there are dozens, probably hundreds, of excellent shows we might love if we could only find out they existed — sure, that’s a classy problem to have. But it is a problem, and this week in particular, I fear it’s a problem for Frayed.

A co-production of Sky UK and Australia’s ABC TV, set at its start in 1988, Frayed dropped its first season on HBO Max last summer. It revolves around Simone Burbeck (Sarah Kendall, who also created the series and has written every episode), a mother of two who is widowed in the series premiere under embarrassing and filthy circumstances. Informed by her lawyer that the entire estate will have to be sold off to pay her late husband’s debts, a desperate and disgruntled Simone brings her children, Lenny (Frazer Hadfield) and Tess (Maggie Ireland-Jones) back to her hometown of Newcastle, Australia — for the first time since she departed more than two decades earlier — and finds out how many people are still angry about the way she left. The first season found Sammy — which, as her children learn only when her mother Jean (Kerry Armstrong) addresses her, is Simone’s real name — code-switching between the poor coping strategies of her youth and the phony “class” she adopted to pass as a London finance wife. Though Sammy ends the season very certain she’s about to leave Newcastle forever (again) and return to England with the kids, a catastrophe in the first-season finale alters her plan. In Season 2, the complexity inherent in dealing with this event — I’m being vague because I really want you to watch the show! — keeps implicating more people, ratcheting the stakes up higher and higher but stopping barely short of total absurdity.

Because of the sharp turn the Season 1 finale takes, Season 2 has a lot of new elements to deal with. Sammy, Tess, and Lenny have a shared trauma that no one really knows how to process. Back in London, Sammy experiences destitution of the sort she only thought she was suffering when she moved back into her childhood home. There’s also a police-investigation that Sammy’s former co-worker Fiona (Diane Morgan) keeps likening to her favorite TV procedurals, like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. (The detective in question also responds to even the lightest criticism by furiously handing in his gun and badge, so evidently he watches cop shows too.)

Through all this, the show is as savagely funny as ever. You like smart jokes? There’s Sammy and her brother Jim (Ben Mingay) gravely discussing how important Dynasty is for the way it foregrounds middle-aged women. Dumb jokes? Jim tries to get rid of an unwanted visitor looking for Sammy by claiming she’s “doing a poo” and that since she hasn’t “been in days, it might be a three-coiler.”

In both its tone and its construction, Frayed‘s closest analogue is Fleabag, a sleeper hit that became a runaway sensation that let its star and creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pretty much write her own ticket in the entertainment industry. But I — someone who not only monitors TV season premieres for professional reasons but also watches this show — had no idea about the Season 2 drop on HBO Max until it was nearly upon me. As a ravenous viewer, I’m generally not mad that I can spend every weekend with a brand-new season of TV to watch, but when the pace of promotion is this relentless given the sheer volume of content — in Frayed‘s case, Season 2 dropped the same day as HBO Max’s (bad) sequel to the ’80s sitcom Head Of The Class — real gems just get lost in the shuffle. Would there be more excitement for Frayed if the platform had rolled it out more slowly, like it did with the very buzzy Hacks and The Other Two earlier this year? We’ll never know!

The balancing act Season 2 pulls off would not be possible without Kendall’s intricate world-building in Season 1; as strong a début as the first season was, the second continually reveals Kendall’s ambition for this story and characters. Its muted launch may make Frayed seem like just another one of the dozens of foreign acquisitions HBO Max makes to pad out its library. But Frayed deserves better, and definitely deserves your attention.

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.