"It made me think that if I ever did win, if I wasn't careful, it might do more harm than good. And we're so well off. We are, really. We have everything we need and a little bit more besides. If suddenly there was more - a lot more - I think it might spoil them." - Amanda Redman as Alison Braithwaite
At Home with the Braithwaites: Complete First Series DVD Review
By Christopher W. Czajka
Alison Braithwaite (Amanda Redman) is a typical British soccer mom (or would that be football mom?) with a typically dysfunctional 21st-century family. Her husband, David (Peter Davison), is overworked and overstressed by his job as manager of a local bank. Her oldest daughter, Virginia (Sarah Smart), is on the verge of flunking out of college. Her middle daughter, Sarah (Sarah Churm), is distraught over not getting a leading role in the school play, and is infatuated with one of her high school teachers. And her wan youngest daughter, Charlotte (Keeley Fawcett), devours enormous quantities of breakfast cereal and wanders about their comfy house with a perpetual "cat that ate the canary" smirk. The Braithwaites live a very familiar, very predictable life in the suburbs of Leeds in northern England. . .comprised of busy school days, backyard barbecues, and Sunday visits from grandma. All of that suddenly changes, however, when Alison turns forty. She doesn't have a mid-life crisis. She doesn't have an affair with someone half her age. She just receives a very special birthday present: a lottery ticket, which ends up winning her the gargantuan jackpot of the first-ever EuroLottery. At Home with the Braithwaites plays upon everyone's ultimate fantasy. . . just what would you do if you won the lottery? Quit your job? Travel around the world? Buy a new house? You probably wouldn't do what Alison Braithwaite does. . .she keeps her winnings a secret, and doesn't tell a soul.
At Home with the Braithwaites premiered on Britain's ITV in the winter of 2000, and was an immediate critical and popular success, running for four highly-rated seasons. Created by Sally Wainwright, a veteran of the formidable British soap Coronation Street, the series features relentless melodrama, biting black comedy, and old-fashioned cliffhangers in a delightful confection of soapy fun. At Home with the Braithwaites combines the bitchy backstabbing of All My Children with the macabre humor of Six Feet Under, throws in a healthy dose of Tales of the City's cleverly intersecting plotlines and unabashed sexuality, and has more unexpected twists and turns than the best of Charles Dickens. In Series One - comprised of six one-hour episodes - the Braithwaites face more cataclysms and calamities than the Ingalls family does in an entire twenty-two episode season of Little House on the Prairie. However, Braithwaites isn't served up with tears and overacting. . .it's hilarious, sometimes touching, and spectacularly well-acted.
Alison Braithwaite isn't the only person in Leeds who's got a secret. Each of the characters has a dark and delicious private scandal on the verge of explosive revelation. Daughter Virginia is a burgeoning lesbian who is desperately in love with the Braithwaites' married next-door neighbor Megan (Julie Graham), a toothy actress locally famous for her suggestive cat food commercial ("If you want to keep your pussy cushy, feed her Pussy Mushy"). Megan, in turn, is having secret trysts with a studly window washer in her garden shed. Daughter Sarah, while making thoroughly inappropriate advances at her known-to-be gay drama teacher, is having a torrid affair with the hottie son of the trashy neighbors from down the street, the Skidmores. And Alison's husband is trying to tone down his own extracurricular activities with Elaine Fishwick (Judy Holt), his naughty single-mom secretary.
One of the most amazing aspects of At Home with the Braithwaites is the jaw-dropping, roller coaster way in which the plot positively careens along. On US daytime soaps like General Hospital or Days of Our Lives, it may take two weeks or more for a single evening to pass. In The Sopranos, which has a comparatively truncated run of episodes, it took a good season and a half for Adriana to get whacked. But life comes at the Braithwaites like machine-gun bullets. In the first episode, Alison turns forty, two neighbors get in a fistfight at her birthday party, she wins the lottery, creates a business, and hires a staff for it. Virginia gets expelled from college, develops her crush on Megan, and gets into a number of fender benders while on a pell-mell dash to the hospital. Sarah sulks when she isn't cast in a school production of Antigone, ignores a boy who is pining for her, and obsesses about her teacher. David has clumsy sex with his secretary in a parking lot, attempts to have her transferred to another office, and then backpedals when she discovers his machinations. Again, all of this happens in the very first episode. . .and, with all of the necessary exposition and character introduction that has to be done, it's a relatively calm time for the characters.
Concerned about what her sudden enormous wealth will do to her cranky husband and squabbling daughters, the good-hearted Alison decides to found a private foundation with the simple mission of helping others. To assist her in running the "Jane Crowther Trust," Alison hires a jaded, idealistic accountant (Lynda Bellingham), and her own steadfastly loyal, salt-of-the-earth friend Marion (Sylvia Syms), with whom she volunteered at the local nursing home. Will Alison's big win remain a secret? How will her family react if they find her out? Will David's jilted mistress ruin her marriage? Is the accountant skimming money out of the trust? And what about the burly, broguing naked guy in the garden shed? To reveal any more about the Braithwaites would be to reveal too much. But suffice it to say that after six episodes of gloriously libidinous suburbanites, heartstopping car chases, hidden pregnancies, sudden disappearances, enraged spouses, and spectacular shopping sprees, you are left absolutely ravenous for the next thrilling installment. Let's hope that the distributor, Acorn Media, plans to release all four seasons, since American fans of the show were left to imagine a conclusion after BBC America inexplicably pulled Braithwaites from its schedule after broadcasting only the first two series.
Aside from the cleverly constructed plotlines and breakneck pacing, At Home with the Braithwaites also boasts excellent ensemble acting. Sarah Smart portrays embattled teenager Virginia Braithwaite with a gusto that gives Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose a run for her money. Virginia's thunderstruck grimaces as her family unravels around her are priceless. Peter Davison, one of a long line of British actors to play Dr. Who, is perfectly cast as the seemingly cojone-free David Braithwaite. Keeley Fawcett's moribund Charlotte Braithwaite is a hysterically understated blend of Wednesday Addams and Margaret O'Brien's character in Meet Me in St. Louis. And Amanda Redman holds the whole crazy circus together with a believable, nuanced performance of a woman whose understanding of her family compels her to make unorthodox decisions. Like all soaps, the series at times teeters on the edge of becoming implausibly farfetched, but that contributes to its charm. There are no alien abductions, evil twins, or demonic possessions; the show deftly manages to convincingly place everyday people in a rapid succession of extraordinary situations, just a few inches away from reality.
The six episodes that comprise the first series are divided onto two DVDs. The DVDs are housed in regular-sized plastic keepcases, which slide into a cardboard slipcover. The menu designs are simple and functional. Episodes on each disc are listed, while footage from each of the episodes housed on the disc plays in a small window. There is individual scene selection for each of the episodes.
