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Funny Woman Season 2, we hardly knew ye! I wish we’d gotten at least two more episodes of the life and times of Sophie Straw, but it’s been a fun, brisk quartet of episodes. I both enjoy and admire how the season’s many significant plots and character
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Funny Woman’s second season is burning through plot like a bunch of raked-up autumnal leaves. A four-episode season means that where we’d be at the midpoint of a season with six episodes, we’re already in penultimate episode territory, often where the big turning points of the season
PBS
Have you seen Almost Famous? It’s Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film about the experiences of "William," a teenage music journalist writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. At one point, William has gotten himself in a terrible bind: he’s been on the road with the
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Sophie Straw (née Barbara Parker and played by Gemma Arterton) just wants to exercise her judgment in both professional and personal matters. Why is that so hard? That’s rhetorical; I know why it’s hard: there would be no TV show without this central conflict and journey, and it
PBS
February is the shortest and cruelest month. Just when you think the horrors of winter are over, February manages to strike with one last snowstorm, deep freeze, or wildfire. For PBS viewers, February rarely brings major debuts. It is treated as a January appendage, with all the major British debuts
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PBS introduced Funny Woman to the American public a year ago, in January 2024. The somewhat awkwardly titled series (based on the Nick Hornby book Funny Girl, necessitating alterations) stars Gemma Arterton (The Critic) as Barabra Parker, 1960s Blackpool Beauty Queen, who has plans to take her success on the
PBS
We've reached the halfway mark of the third decade of the 21st century, and while things are not anything like people said the future would be, there have been bright spots. One of those bright spots is the rise of prestige TV, a subset of high-end programming that
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Despite the awkwardness of the series name, critics and reviewers loved Gemma Arterton's first season of Funny Woman. (So-called because it's adapted from the Nick Hornsby novel Funny Girl, a title already taken by a rather famous musical.) However, viewers, assuming the title was a comedy,
PBS
PBS' newest addition to the period drama lineup, Funny Woman (based on the novel Funny Girl by Nick Hornby, with the title altered for obvious reasons), was commissioned for a Season 2 by producer Sky around the same time it landed an American distributor. As luck would have it,
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In the first season of ITV’s Funny Woman, Gemma Arterton as Barbara Parker (stage name: Sophie Straw) is unquestionably the sun around whom everyone else revolves, but Barbara’s besties, Diane and Marge (Clare-Hope Ashitey and Alexa Davies, respectively), provide extra zing, oomph, and mutual support to her life
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Series finales have a lot of work to do, and that sometimes can go double for the finale of a show’s first season as it tries to stick the landing for the first time. The goals they aim for can support and/or undermine one another. That baked-in tension
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Sophie was flying high in last week's Funny Woman; this week, she’s laid low. Some would say she has only herself to blame, and to those people, I issue a very loud and rude raspberry while showing them the door directly out. We have neither time nor