Mammals

A quality comedy-drama which never loses an element of surprise. The episodes are half an hour at most, and each is a treat. Corden’s performance carries the whole thing.

A strange and very writerly and theatrical little show that hails, fittingly enough, from acclaimed playwright Jez Butterworth (The Ferryman). That Mammals perhaps could have worked as well or better as a two-hour stage show, rather than in six, half-hour-ish installments, is a thoroughly worthy complaint. But after wondering at the purpose of the whole thing through its opening episodes, I quite enjoyed how its callbacks and bits of artificial structuring paid off.

As for what it all ends up saying about modern relationships, it is more than messy in a way that it doesn’t fully pull together. Still, for all the ways Mammals bites off more than it can chew, the overall meal is worth sitting down for to observe who the fellow diners at the table of life truly are.

Kreiling is sufficiently inscrutable as Amandine, one of those gorgeous, stubbornly mysterious seductresses that screenwriters can't seem to resist. Jamie is the kind of cuddly everybloke Corden excels at, though the comedian also exposes the core of his character's heartbreak with intriguing intensity. Alas, by the final half hour, there is little sympathy to go around for Jamie or any of the primary mammals in Mammals.

“Mammals” (a poor title, incidentally) is a bit more enticing with its ruminations on dealing with loss and the vagaries of relationships.

Butterworth’s script loses tautness, unfortunately, when focus shifts to Lue, Jamie’s gloomy sister. Sally Hawkins is among the most enchanting actors working today, but even she can’t imbue a loopy storyline that sees Lue imagining herself as Coco Chanel’s assistant – a coping mechanism for her ill-defined ennui – with emotional resonance. More successful are Mammals’ more straightforwardly surreal moments.

“Mammals” works to build comedy out of tragedy and sends its characters to hell and back en route to a hoped-for happy ending. It’s tricky to pull off, and Butterworth has a way of giving sentimentality a dry, cynical edge that doesn’t dispose you to care about his characters as much as you need to. But Corden and Kreiling help to compensate, along with Sally Hawkins as Jamie’s sister and Colin Morgan as Jamie’s brother-in-law.

We’re going to give Mammals a chance because it not only will likely get even darker after its dark first episode, but it’ll give Corden a chance to show people what kind of work he’ll do once he goes back to acting full-time.

It is uncomfortably like a play, with episodes of speechifying and dialogue that sound more constructed than natural. ... One can imagine some version of this working just fine on the stage — and “Jerusalem” is longer than the whole of “Mammals” — but as television it wears a patina of inauthenticity. ... I’m sure many will find the series, directed by Stephanie Laing, compelling. Presented in cinematic widescreen, it is fundamentally an intelligent, adult entertainment, not without ideas.

Neither man may be perfect, but their wives put them through so much agony it leaves Butterworth’s satire of male victimhood tasting like pretty weak sauce.

Ultimately, creator James Richardson’s dramedy sinks because it is not a compelling enough sum of all its parts. While the writing is strong, it doesn’t make up for how tired shows and movies about complicated marriages are.

While there is certainly a twist of sorts towards the end, it wasn’t as clever as it needed to be to justify what preceded it, nor the bizarre dip into surrealism that follows.