Disabled people are routinely ignored, underestimated, overlooked and patronised. The perfect drug dealers, in other words. This is the gratifyingly sardonic concept behind comedian Rosie Jones\u2019s new sitcom \u2013 co-written with Veep\u2019s Peter Fellows \u2013 in which she stars as Emily Dawkins, a woman with cerebral palsy whose benefits are senselessly cut by the DWP. After a humiliating work capability assessment, she runs into old school mate Ewen in the loos. Once he remembers who she is (no, not the woman he shagged in the Co-op store room), Ewen is delighted to see her again \u2013 \u201cI thought you died!\u201d \u2013 and is soon offering Emily 50 quid to deliver a mysterious package for him. Initially Emily declines; too dodgy. But with the prospect of an actual paycheck from her charity work dwindling, she reluctantly gets on with the job \u2013 and is pleasantly surprised to find that her disability allows her to get away with murder. Well, distributing cocaine, at any rate.<\/p>\n
Such a premise \u2013 impoverished disabled woman cornered into dealing drugs to survive contemporary Britain \u2013 could have produced an incredibly bleak show; criminal gangs do regularly exploit disabled people for financial gain. Yet Pushers comprehensively swerves sincere social commentary. Rather than being used by Ewen, Emily quickly becomes the enterprise\u2019s driving force. While her childhood pal wants to shift the \u00a3500k worth of cocaine he has somehow acquired, then bow out of the game for good, his new employee opts to diversify into the heinous synthetic street drug spice behind his back. She also insists on recruiting a team to distribute the drugs faster. Two are sourced from Wee CU, the disabled-toilet-monitoring charity Emily volunteers for: Harry (Ruben Reuter), a dance lover with Down\u2019s syndrome, and the stern, ruthless and neurodiverse-coded Hope (a brilliant performance from Libby Mai), who is keen to get stuck in (her qualifications include being \u201cthe treasurer of the official The Bill fanclub\u201d and spending \u201c42% of my spare time playing drug dealer simulations\u201d). Emily also brings in local alcoholic Sean (Jon Furlong), who passes his days scaring the public by ranting to himself in the street. After Ewen insists his tough-as-old-boots mum be involved too, their crack team is complete.<\/p>\n
The other thing that prevents Pushers from straying into seriousness is Ewen himself (Ryan McParland), whose astonishing stupidity suffuses the entire series. Physically, McParland bears more than a passing resemblance to the American comedian Tim Robinson, whose unhinged performances in his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave breathed new life into the sketch genre. The actor seems to be channelling a similar comic vibe too: Ewen is loud, weird and unpredictably intense. The individual jokes designed to demonstrate his idiocy might seem hacky on paper \u2013 \u201cname me one person who has ever died from drugs?!\u201d \u2013 but McParland\u2019s exaggerated gormlessness makes such lines giddily funny.<\/p>\n
As Emily, Jones tones down her natural exuberance slightly \u2013 she is the straight woman to Ewen and his bonkers malapropisms and misapprehensions. Yet she\u2019s still an agent of farce; in all the many, many TV shows about drug dealing I have watched over the years, I can safely say I have never seen so much spilt cocaine in my life. And as hinted by the flash forward at the start of episode one \u2013 in which Emily is pursued through a hospital by a glowering gangster, before running straight into a doctor holding an open blood bag \u2013 no matter how dark things get, silliness still dominates.<\/p>\n
The first couple of episodes of Pushers are absorbing and frequently hilarious. Jones\u2019s ability to joke about disability is unparalleled (\u201cI didn\u2019t breathe for 17 minutes\u201d is how she explains the origin of her cerebral palsy to her benefits assessor. \u201cI really wouldn\u2019t recommend it\u201d). And she is careful to ensure Emily\u2019s responses to Ewen are priceless in themselves. Yet as the series progresses, the comedy is overshadowed by a narrative that becomes increasingly hard to make sense of. Alongside the antics of Emily\u2019s unwieldy criminal crew, both she and Ewen have romantic subplots, with the former developing a confusingly chaste entanglement with Jo, her Insta-glam boss at Wee CU, who dangles payment and sex in front of Emily like two ghostly carrots. What\u2019s more, our hero\u2019s sudden switch from reluctant dealer to gang mastermind is never fully explained: did her conscience just evaporate?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the slapstick and cartoonish inanity do start to wear thin after a while. Although its lack of sentimentality and commitment to hard comedy is admirable, Pushers still could have done with leaning a little further into the scathing satire promised by its setup. Instead, what we ultimately get is a gag-strewn, generally lighthearted portrayal of small-town turf wars. Jones\u2019s action-sitcom certainly has its moments, but it could have had slightly more bite.<\/p>\n
Pushers is on Channel 4 now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disabled people are routinely ignored, underestimated, overlooked and patronised. The perfect drug dealers, in other words. This is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-198508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114712903978276035","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}