
Big Mood Review: Nicola Coughlan is Tremendous in This Offbeat British Comedy About Friendship and Mental Health
Tubi’s Big Mood is a series that feels familiar in many ways.
A comedy-drama that follows in the occasionally dark, often emotional, and vaguely cringe footsteps of shows like Fleabag, Everything I Know About Love, and Such Brave Girls, it’s as fretful as it is funny, full of biting humor, uncomfortable social situations, and a pair of best friends trying to navigate a challenging time their lives together.
But what sets this series apart from so many shows of its ilk is its determined focus on something television has long struggled to depict with any real degree of nuance or sensitivity: Mental health.

Too often, shows treat mental illness as a plot twist — -or worse, the butt of a joke meant to be punched down or laughed at — rather than a lived-in, nuanced part of their character’s stories. Thank goodness, Big Mood is not one of those kinds of shows.
The story follows Maggie (Nicola Coughlan) and Eddie (Lydia West), a pair of thirtysomething young women who are stuck in that weird time of life when you realize that all the big dreams and goals you had for yourself in your twenties are not exactly turning out the way you thought they would, and you still don’t really feel like the adult everyone insists you are.
Maggie’s a playwright, albeit a not very successful one — the Guardian describes her work as “worse than most crimes” — and it’s not entirely clear how she’s supporting herself. Eddie, for her part, inherited a bar when her father passed and spends most of her time struggling to keep it open since it’s the last physical connection she has to him.
The setup feels fairly familiar and feels like a show we’ve seen before. Eddie argues with her brother about whether they should sell Wet Mouth. Maggie makes an embarrassing trip to her old high school to speak about all her post-graduate success (which boils down to a single fringe play) where she flings herself at a former teacher.
There’s a disastrous dinner party. An insufferable ex. A third friend with an unspoken and painfully obvious crush.
It’s awkward and cringe and some aspects of its story lack anything resembling nuance. But in many ways, Big Mood’s frequently manic and all-over-the-place energy perfectly reflects the uneven journies of its lead characters, particularly Maggie, who suffers from bipolar disorder.

Maggie’s illness comes in stages — periods of chaotic, high-energy ridiculousness, followed by crippling depression and lethargy. One minute she’s jauntily buzzing down the street on a brightly colored electric scooter she impulse bought, the next she’s scheming a way to abandon her Love Actually-themed birthday party because she can’t face the public performance of it all.
She struggles to work due to the side effects of her medication, but when she’s off it, she can barely function. She frequently fails to tick the boxes of basic life responsibilities, and even when she finally follows the advice of a medical professional and restarts her lithium, trying to rebalance her dosage levels creates an entirely new and awful set of problems she never expected.
It’s raw and relatable in a way that television often likes to smooth over, not a teachable moment so much as a surprisingly intricate depiction of what it’s like to live with a mental disorder — both for Maggie, who’s suffering the highs and lows of the disease, but for everyone around her, who can’t really trust or count on her as much as they’d like to be able to. (And certainly not as much as she relies on them.)

Coughlan is genuinely fantastic as Maggie. Her performance is both deeply funny and shockingly honest, carefully balancing her character’s chaotic charisma with the uncontrollable ups and downs of her illness.
A big presence even on her most stable of days, her Maggie is frequently an accidental steamroller, running over everyone’s best intentions and personal needs in the name of her own.
This role is certainly the most complex material Coughlan’s ever gotten to play and she rises to the occasion admirably, grounding her performance in a constant awareness that no matter how much Maggie might wish to, she cannot outrun, outmaneuver, or otherwise wish away her mind’s faulty wiring.
More importantly, despite the frequently awkward and/or uncomfortable situations Maggie often finds herself in, Big Mood is careful never to make her character the butt of the joke. It’s not a show that’s interested in punching down at a young woman who’s struggling with a disease she has no control over but rather offering contextualization — for all that Maggie’s bipolar disorder impacts her life, her illness is just one piece of her story.

Instead, the show is most interested in what it means to live with a mental illness, and how that affects not just the person who’s suffering from bipolar disorder (or depression or severe anxiety or diagnosis TBD) but the people in their lives, as well.
Lydia West has the occasionally thankless-seeming job of playing the straight man to Coughlan’s frequently more exuberant mania, much as Eddie must constantly shoulder the bulk of the emotional labor that is her and Maggie’s friendship.
This doesn’t mean that Eddie loves her BFF any less — and she’s clearly well versed in the ins and outs of Maggie’s illness — but it does frequently place a strange tension between them when Eddie often has to put her own worries and needs aside in the name of dealing with Maggie’s issues.
After all, Eddie is a young woman who is suffering from her own fair share of problems and trauma, and Maggie is far from the most reliable support system. This means she often finds herself trying to navigate big issues on her own, often while trying to support her BFF through whatever crisis she’s currently enduring.

It’s a careful emotional balance to strike in a relationship that undergoes a fair amount of strain, and Big Mood smartly doesn’t shy away from showing us the toll that Maggie’s behavior — whether she means it or not — can take on their friendship. (And, really, all the relationships in her life.)
The series’ six episodes conclude with consequences, hard choices, and a messiness that feels painfully genuine and unexpected. The show has yet to be renewed for a second season, but goodness it deserves to be, if only because there are too few programs like it on the air right now. Big Mood isn’t perfect, but it’s deeply and unapologetically itself. And that should count for something.
What did you think of Big Mood? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Big Mood is currently streaming on Tubi.
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