Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sally4Ever’ On HBO, About A Bored Woman Discovering Herself Via A Torrid Affair

Cringe comedy, on TV and film, has been around for decades. The Farrelly Brothers have been making a mint off awkwardness and bodily fluids for 25 years, and Ricky Gervais came to fame with the cringe-inducing classics The Office and Extras. Sally4Ever definitely fits in this category, and takes the cringeworthiness to new levels. But is it funny?

SALLY4EVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An a cappella quartet of middle-aged men sing a creepy version of “Faith,” while a woman sits in the audience with her parents. Her mother asks if the lead singer has always been bald and if he’s asked her daughter to marry him yet.

The Gist: Sally (Catherine Shepherd) is the woman in the middle; she’s been in a relationship with the bald lead singer of that group, David (Alex Macqueen), for close to a decade. She’s so dissatisfied with him that she doesn’t even kiss him on the lips anymore. Suffice to say, the guy is a lot to handle. He’s weird, for one: His ritual of clipping his toenails borders on disgusting. He’s clingy and has all the manliness of a sponge. When he tries to have sex with Sally and she refuses, he rubs one out in the bathroom, loading his hands with lotion with the thoroughness of a surgeon scrubbing before a procedure.

One night, David asks Sally to marry him. When she demurs, he begs, cries, begs and cries some more until she relents and says, “all right!” He’s ecstatic; he wants Sally to wear his mother’s old wedding dress, despite the fact it has stains on it from his mother’s “glands” (Ewww). She’s resigned to all this, figuring she can’t do any better.

But the day before, she saw a sexy woman on the tube flirting with her, which affected her so much she left the presentation she was giving to the marketing agency she works for. The next morning, she sees the woman, Emma (Julia Davis) again, handing out invites to her singing performance at a local club. After the engagement, Sally gets up after David falls asleep, goes to the club, finds Emma, and has a wild time with her, opening up desires that had been hidden for, well, basically for her whole life.

After David leaves for a business trip, Emma tells Sally that she needs somewhere to stay for a night. Sally agrees, leading to a night of sex that Sally has never experienced before. It’s so intense that after David comes back, she breaks up with him.

Our Take: Julia Davis not only stars in Sally4Ever, but she created, wrote and directed the show, too. And the first episode has moments that are hilarious, even though you are sometimes laughing while going “Oh, man! They went there, didn’t they?” at the same time. It’s cringe comedy at its finest, and if you’re game to see gags that involve masturbation, butt plugs, used tampons and David’s complete and utter lack of testicles.

Davis takes the disengaged woman genre and turns it on its ear. She doesn’t just give Sally, to this point a bit of a mousy individual who doesn’t seem to stand up for herself, an avenue to discover herself, but she does so within the context of one of the weirder relationships on TV. David is just odd, to the point where it’s a shock that any woman agreed to sleep with him, much less forge a long-term relationship with him. Macqueen plays up David’s extreme quirks to the hilt; he’s a guy that thinks pretending to attack and rape Sally is just “mixing things up.” And Davis plays the sexy libertine to the hilt, as well. And we know that the deeper Sally gets into having a relationship with Emma instead of just having a fling, more problems will crop up.

Sex and Skin: So many shots of Emma and Sally rubbing up against each other during their night of passion.

Parting Shot: After Sally breaks up with him, David cries into the wedding gown and breathes in deeply, not knowing what is attached to it. Ewwwwww. But really friggin’ funny.

Sleeper Star: We haven’t talked about the weirdos a Sally’s workplace yet. It seems like she and her buddy Nigel (Julian Barratt) have a rapport we’ll discover later. But we definitely want to see more from the shy Elanor (Felicity Montagu) who has no problems about talking about boiled eggs making her breasts grow and is pretty open about how she got into the wheelchair she uses.

Most Pilot-y Line: During the montage where we see Sally and Emma having sex, we also see David in his hotel, doing extreme flossing, painting a picture of Sally, doing a needlepoint project of Sally’s name in a heart, and then getting down when his biscuit dissolves in his tea. It’s goes from silly to absurd to pathetic, and it makes us actively want Sally to dump David’s ass, even if Emma isn’t exactly the most stable choice.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you like cringe comedy, then Sally4Ever is the best in this category since Ricky Gervais ruled HBO in the mid-aughts.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Sally4Ever on HBO Now