Break Clause review, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll never want to live with anyone again

Lara Ricote’s tale of a couple who break up after moving in together is weird, hugely funny and uncomfortably true-to-life at times

A t 22, you move from Leeds to London for your first proper job, and get the keys to a flat with your uni boyfriend. But on day one, you break up, and are then stuck living together for the next six months as “friends” until you can wriggle out of your tenancy. We’ve all been there, right? Well, maybe we haven’t but, watching Break Clause, it’s easy to feel as though you have. This six-part comedy-drama harks back to the peak sadcom era of the late 2010s, when pretty much every show on TV was being referred to as “the new Fleabag”, and tears were de rigueur. It will make you laugh, it might make you cry and, at the very least, it will make you think twice about moving in with anybody ever again.

Break Clause is the creation of Jess Bray, who has worked on Big Boys and We Might Regret This, and is directed by Alice Snedden, co-writer and star in Starstruck. Unlike that series, Break Clause isn’t a whimsical romcom, despite a very whimsical romcom opening in which Ben (Samuel Bottomley) chooses the exact moment that his girlfriend, Lil (Lara Ricote), is about to walk across the stage at graduation to tell her that he will move down to London with her after all ( men , amirite?). Don’t let the soundtrack fool you, either; you may be singing along to Baby, Now That I’ve Found You by the Foundations and Sylvester’s disco bop You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), but it will be out of habit rather than unbridled joy.

It is not unrelentingly bleak, but Break Clause captures post-university malaise in a way that is almost uncomfortably true-to-life. While Lil has a job lined up with an architectural practice, Ben is an unemployed writer, and resorts to skip diving to save on groceries. He won’t do a medical trial for money, it’s “morally dodgy”, he says, although he quickly changes his mind when he finds out that it’s £800 for each study. Much like the real world, where, post-graduation, friends’ circumstances can change seemingly magically and without warning and the word “broke” can lose all meaning, there is also a class element at play. Ben resents Lil, who, like Ricote, is Mexican-American, for coasting down to the capital with her “big fucking bank account”, while he has spent all summer working in an ice-cream van to be able to make the move. It’s a little heavy-handed at times, a little too north/south divide (Ben is a northerner, who grew up in Leeds and went to university there), but it makes its point on privilege. Not least when Ben admits to their Thanksgiving dinner guests that the turkey they are eating was sourced from a bin.

Luckily, it is also very funny, with a weird bent that updates the sadcom premise for our current golden age of deadpan weirdness (think: Saturday Night Live UK). Speaking of SNL, there is much crossover here: Jack Shep plays Lil and Ben’s apparently guileless mate Liam (part of a winning crew that also includes Assa Kanouté and Tamika Bennett), while Hammed Animashaun plays a terrible estate agent who doesn’t even own a pen that works. Nathan Foad, one of the writers of SNL, was also in the writers room here and plays Lil’s boss, Owen, who is desperate to ingratiate himself with his team. Really, though, the best and weirdest (meant, of course, lovingly) thing here is Ricote, whose quirky comic chops make her the perfect candidate for scenes such as the one in which Lil gyrates against a wall while asking her date: “Do you like this?” (“I’d actually quite like it to stop,” he says). Her lines are among the best, in writing and delivery: “You were always so fucking negative about London,” she reminds Ben, mid-fight. “What if the water tasted weird? What if it was too loud? What about terrorism ?!”

It’s not a romcom, but it does end with something of a romcom scenario: Lil is offered a transfer abroad, and the pair have to figure out whether to enact their break clause (the clue was in the title, I suppose). The final episode pulls its punches a little when it comes to this dilemma, and the pair’s “quarter-psychic” stirrer neighbour, Frances (Charly Clive), who clearly has the hots for Ben. Still, things have been left open for series two, and I sincerely hope it gets made. “You have to be a lot of different people when you’re in a long relationship,” Ben’s dad, Alan (John Thomson), tells him, and it feels as though there are more versions of these two, maybe even some happier ones! Please!, that we are yet to meet.