Freeform's Single Drunk Female makes recovery feel universal

Salon.com

"If television is a mechanism that both defines and moves with the current of fashion, Single Drunk Female is right on time in this respect and others," says Melanie McFarland. "Debuting in the midst of Dry January guarantees its alignment with a surge in temperance trends. Just as many people, if not more, are headed in the opposite direction of willful sobriety, a product of pandemic exhaustion and depression. You know, those ongoing concerns we met in early 2020 with joking/not joking about day-drinking. Series creator Simone Finch recently explained in a Television Critics Association press conference that the seeds for this show began germinating in 2012, before she got sober. So if this story about substance abuse recovery derived from her own life feels relatable to folks living out the definition of surge depletion that is coincidental." McFarland adds: "The opening episodes are very good at conveying the raw irritation of sober life to someone who's a newborn to it. Samantha is grieving her father's recent death and a break-up with her best friend Brit (Sasha Compère), and the writers excel at presenting these as contributing factors, not excuses, in Sam's journey from self-loathing and egotism into responsibility. Even so, Single Drunk Female doesn't relinquish the right for Sam and everyone else in recovery to laugh at themselves at their best and worst. Jojo Brown's Mindy Moy gets the cream of these moments as Samantha's fellow AA member and new boss at the local grocery store, who gently smacks the air out of her ego at work and refuses to sit too close to her sloppiness at meetings. 'I'm your chic friend who needs you to try a little harder,' Mindy tells Samantha – but truly, isn't she reading everyone who's traded in couture for sweatpants?"

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• Single Drunk Female can be frustrating to watch: "Sofia Black-D’Elia (of the too-soon-canceled The Mick) stars as Sam Fink, a writer for a BuzzFeed-like website penning listicles like 'Here’s 10 Dogs That Look Like the Cast of Gossip Girl,'" says Roxana Hadadi. "In the pilot, she waltzes into work late and drunk, assaults her boss (the always delightful Jon Glaser), and is fired and arrested. With nary a mention of student-loan debt or a broken lease, Sam leaves New York City in disgrace and goes home to the Boston suburbs to live with her 'smother' Carol (Ally Sheedy, providing an enjoyably blunt edge to an underwritten character). After 30 days of rehab, Sam is assigned a probation officer, Gail (Madison Shepard), and has to figure out how to rebuild her life. Where to start when she doesn’t know exactly where she went wrong? Frustratingly, Single Drunk Female....doesn’t seem to know, either. There are certain elements of Sam’s life that the show illuminates with glaring floodlights as the causes of her drinking: her father’s death from cancer; the engagement of her high-school boyfriend, Joel (Charlie Hall), to her former best friend, Brit (Sasha Compère); her mother’s emotional distance. But Sam is an unreliable narrator, a quality the series doesn’t quite address. Her memories are missing chunks of time, and her reality is colored by her understanding of herself as a victim. We’re told Sam is brilliant — her bedroom bookcase is littered with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac, she graduated magna cum laude from NYU, and her writing voice is positively described as 'an alcoholic’s take on Joan Didion’s "Leaving New York"' — but we don’t read her writing, nor do we hear her perspective on criticism, journalism, or culture. About that Didion reference: Didion’s essay is named Goodbye to All That, not 'Leaving New York.' The work was originally printed in Didion’s 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and reprinted in a 1995 anthology titled, yes, 'Leaving New York: Writers Look Back. Goodbye to All That' is shorthand for a writer of a particular type and temperament, and if we’re meant to see Sam in such a way, wouldn’t she have said something about the inaccuracy of calling the essay 'Leaving New York'? This is the kind of inattentiveness that worms throughout the show, much like when Sam and Brit argue about who was made first-chair violin in high school; later on, we see a cello in Sam’s bedroom, and a violin is never mentioned again."
• Single Drunk Female puts characters first, relationships second and issues a distant third: "Instantly charming and dense with talent, Single Drunk Female nonetheless presents at first as an ungainly misfit: a show about an almost-30 alcoholic on the teen-aimed Freeform network," says Inkoo Kang. "But, it turns out, sobriety shares some commonalities with puberty. For the newly dry Sam, there are a lot of firsts: first sober dance, first sober hookup, first sober writing session. Committing to the 12 steps also means figuring out how to socialize beyond the bar and reevaluating which friendships have the potential to transform from sozzled camaraderie into something else. It’s not exactly a second adolescence, but we do watch Sam, who’d Godzilla’d the pillars of her adulthood, build back her life, brick by humiliating brick. Refreshingly free of didacticism, the hilarious half-hour series was created by Simone Finch, who based her protagonist’s sobriety journey on her own experience. Single Drunk Female puts characters first, relationships second and issues a distant third; this isn’t just a story about quitting alcohol, but about cynical, rules-avoidant, darkly funny Sam quitting alcohol."
• Single Drunk Female is the rare screen depiction showing the messy, sloggy, difficult and ridiculous minutiae of the “one day at a time” that Alcoholics Anonymous has made famous: "There have been even fewer sobriety stories told about young women who have grown up in a 'rosé all day' culture that normalizes nonstop imbibing," says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. "Freeform’s Single Drunk Female is a refreshing antidote to all this. The show follows 28-year-old Samantha Finch (Sofia Black-D’Elia), who loses her New York media job after a drunken outburst and is forced to move back home to Boston with her mother (Ally Sheedy) and remain sober to avoid jail time. Creator Simone Finch, previously a writer for The Conners, based the idea on her own struggles with getting sober over the last decade, and this grounds the series with a sense of reality — especially once it gets going. The result is a take on sobriety that doesn’t gloss over the hard parts but remains optimistic, and often very funny."
• Finally, a show accurately depicting 20-something alcoholism: "TV loves a messy woman. She stumbles! She embarrasses herself in public! She’s inarticulate—in a hot way!" says Jenny Singer. "Single Drunk Female, a Freeform show premiering on Hulu on January 20, swerves from this model." Singer adds: "Anyone can be an alcoholic, Single Drunk Female demonstrates—a 20-something party girl, an MIT coder from a close family, a kindly supermarket manager. Sam is a late-20s Jewish bisexual who just happens to have a drinking problem. (This late-20s Jew appreciated the many deep-cut Jewish references in the show.) It’s interesting to compare the arc of Single Drunk Female to the very unexamined alcoholism in And Just Like That. Why does Miranda drink? Why does Miranda stop? What support does she draw on, how hard is it for her to quit? We don’t really know. Meanwhile, in a flashback, a drunk Sam theorizes about impostor syndrome. 'I thought I had that,' she muses. 'But then it turns out I was right about everything I thought I couldn’t do, which is everything.' The show offers Sam no easy resolution but a chance at redemption. She works hard—so hard—every day, to stay sober. And to be kind. And less impulsive."
• Sofia Black-D’Elia admits Single Drunk Female has a Gilmore Girls-esque vibe: "When I first read the script, I did think of Emily and Lorelai, actually, not Lorelai and Rory," says Black-D'Elia. "Especially in the later seasons, when they kind of have more warmth toward each other, but it’s always complicated, it’s always kind of a fraught history. Those are my favorite kinds of relationships, and you just don’t see them very often in television and film. At least, not the nuanced, really complex, messy version of it. So it’s been such a joy for us to explore that and really just try to get under each other’s skin... I love honest mother-daughter relationships, and (this show) felt like this could be that.” Ally Sheedy adds: “Sofia’s very inventive and Sofia will go to a place where you’re just messy and awful. And I love that because that’s what I like. I like being able to just be messy and awful, as we all are on the moments of our days when we think nobody is watching us."
• Single Drunk Female creator Simone Finch on writing the comedy based on her personal experiences: “I started writing this in 2012 before I got sober and I got sober and I realized it was about a girl getting sober,” said Finch, who is now seven years and eight months sober, adding: “I called it a living script as it sort of evolved as I got more sober.”
• Finch recalls her path from being an alcoholic to Single Drunk Female: "So I got my first job working for a showrunner in 2012 on Craigslist, which was shocking then and it's shocking now," she says. "And she gave me the assignment. She said, 'You have to write if you're going to have this job.' Because I wasn't writing, I was drinking, obviously. And so I wrote this half-hour piece of garbage, but the character's name was Samantha. And so that's where it started, is from this pile of crap. And then I made it an hour because I got really inspired by Orange Is the New Black and Shameless. I wanted that tone. It's really funny because a couple reviews have picked up on the fact that there seems to not be enough time in this story and I'm like, 'Oh, they can feel that it was an hour.' Then I just started rewriting it. I used to work with Norm Macdonald on Roseanne and The Conners, and he read a draft and he actually gave me some of the best notes anyone has ever given me. And it was after I did the draft with his notes that Freeform bought it. So I thanked him. Yeah, this story's been through many iterations and many, many drafts."