It’s been 5 years since one of the best LGBTQ+ shows and I’m still completely obsessed

Mae Martin’s semi-autobiographical show, Feel Good, remains one of the greatest gifts to LGBTQ+ TV five years after its premiere.

The two-season comedy starring Mae as a fictionalised version of themselves and Charlotte Ritchie as their love interest George has to be one of my favourite depictions of queerness in all of its forms.

The Channel 4 show first came out to plenty of acclaim and fanfare, securing it a second season and cultivating plenty of impressed fans along the way, myself included.

For the uninitiated, the first episode opens on George (Ritchie), who is initially characterised as a stereotypical heterosexual woman on a comedy night out with her uptight friend Binky – and utterly enthralled by Mae’s pithy stand-up set.

When the two connect later that night, we embark on the charming, turbulent (often heartbreaking) story of their relationships that explores late-in-life coming out, self-empowerment, gender identity, and co-dependency.

All of this is hooked onto the central throughline around Mae’s past struggle with addiction, their attempts to stay sober, and reckoning with a traumatic past as they try to envision a future with George.

Martin manages to write tender and evocative scenes depicting the pervasive ways that addiction has imploded not only Mae’s life but those of the people around them – including their parents (portrayed by Lisa Kudrow and Adrian Lukis in the show).

Meanwhile, George is by no means forgotten by the plot. We see her work through her fears around her identity, her anxieties around being another thing her partner is addicted to, her complex relationship with her parents and even question what she wants out of her career.

Heck, even messy roommate Phil (portrayed by Phil Burgers) gets some tearjerking character development throughout the 12 episodes.

What makes Feel Good so refreshing is – despite the difficult and heavy topics it deals with – it delivers them with such frankness and with so many well-weaved wisecracks in between that it also stands up as one of the funniest shows around.

Whatever Mae and Charlotte were infusing into that script was comedy gold that can flip you from crying to laughing with a well-timed punchline.

In a TV landscape where it is rare to see well-fleshed-out queer women and non-binary characters, Feel Good offers this representation in spades and makes no apologies for the fact that sometimes both George and Mae can be utterly unlikable.

Yet you can’t help rooting for them anyway.

It is also one of my favourite depictions of love on screen. As something worth fighting for at its ugliest and messiest, because that’s when you know there could be something beautiful underneath.

The show knows exactly when to go all in on the madness, like the episode where George goes to a wedding for the day so Mae completely spirals and ends up on a completely mad dash with her (kind of) sponsor Maggie to stalk her daughter Lava (Rity Arya).

Or the time Mae and George go to Blackpool to bury the ashes of Mae’s cat Solomon with their parents, and the day breaks down into chaos. Or when Mae dresses up as a medieval knight and proposes to George in a school hall.

The list goes on…

But it also completely disarms you by interspersing the hijinks with moments of depth, such as when Mae admits to wearing black all the time because they are afraid to wear colour, and it breaks George’s heart.

Or when the couple talk about Mae’s gender identity and George simply tells them, ‘you tell me the right words and I’ll use them’.

Even the moment George realises that despite her whole life having changed after finding love with Mae, she still misses her old friends, despite the fact that they don’t totally get her now.

Strangely, it also serves as a time capsule of this golden time in the late 2010s/early 20s when we seemed to have reached the pinnacle of LGBTQ+ and women’s rights.

When championing trans rights was seen as the mainstream stance; calling out high-profile abusers hadn’t completely devolved into a social media battle over wokery and cancellation; and the TV industry felt like it was making an active effort to platform complex queer stories told in full (rather than being cancelled premturely).

I love how Charlotte and George are selfish and angry and enabling and scared. I love how queer intimacy is portrayed as something tender and heartfelt and kinky and messy and fragile and rough.

Most of all, I love that we get a satisfying happy ending. No ifs, ands or buts.

I’m desperate to see more British adult comedies explore the ever-evolving LGBTQ+ community through a queer female and non-binary lens that reach the same calibre as Feel Good.

So, for those who have never seen it, this is your sign to watch it. Right now.

And for those who have, what are you waiting for? It’s overdue for a rewatch to hit you in the feels all over again.

Feel Good is available to stream on Netflix now.

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