An affair. A car accident. Murder. The first episode of new homegrown drama series Bad Mothers gets straight to the action that comes to consume the lives of a group of mums in a well-to-do suburb of Melbourne. Watch the trailer below.
Given its premise, the comparisons to Big Little Lies are inevitable, and although Bad Mothers is superficially similar, the tone is actually closer to that of Ten’s AFL drama Playing for Keeps – another show that featured a death in its launch episode and took a while to find its feet.
In the case of Bad Mothers, there are violent lurches in style in early episodes, with some of the cast members (a list that includes Melissa George, Daniel MacPherson and Tess Haubrich) seemingly acting in very different shows from one another. That’s down to the fact that, besides the homicide and ongoing police investigation that dominates the plot, there’s a lightness to Bad Mothers (another factor distinguishing it from the more intense Big Little Lies).
That levity comes courtesy of the Bad Mothers Club, Maddie (Mandy McElhinney), Danielle (Jessica Tovey) and Bindy (Shalom Brune-Franklin). The group of women don’t fit in with the snootier clique of primary school parents and their more trivial concerns – a chick-raising task at school, for example – are in marked contrast to the show’s main hook. If it can pull those disparate elements together successfully, this could have legs. (Starts Mon., Feb. 18 at 9pm; Nine) 3 stars