In the midst of Stay at Home orders and a global pandemic, Netflix released a show called Feel Good. Feel Good is a comedic and semi-autobiographical miniseries about comedian Mae Martin. The show’s cast doesn’t just feature Martin, but familiar faces like Lisa Kudrow of Friends. The six-episode series mostly focuses on the intricacies and intensities of Mae’s career, love life, and sobriety. It is funny, dramatic, and quirky in a slightly dark way.
Feel Good takes place in a bustling city in England, in which Mae and her friends reside. Mae, a Canadian, openly queer, up-and-coming comedian lives in an apartment with her girlfriend Georgina (Georgie, for short). A few months after meeting Georgie at a comedy club, she moves in with her and immediately video-calls her parents with Georgie right by her side. Mae spends most of the series navigating her career in comedy and performing in the aforementioned comedy club, which is run by one of her friends.
At the beginning of the series, Mae’s life seems to be going well. The series then takes a turn for the worse when, during the phone conversation with Georgie, Mae’s parents mention her old vice: a cocaine addiction. Mae immediately hangs up on her parents and dodges questions from her girlfriend. After lots of pestering from Georgie, she decides to go to a Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.) meeting, where she meets eccentric friends and learns how to cope with her addiction in more healthy ways.
What makes this show so unique and addictive is that it’s brutally honest about the realities of addiction. Mae is not the ideal protagonist- she’s more of an anti-hero. While she does stand as a funny, clever problem-solver, she is nowhere near perfect. She isn’t always honest about her past drug addiction, and she doesn’t open up to Georgie about her time in jail until the second episode. Mae also goes behind her girlfriend’s back and does a comedy skit about her, which results in the inevitable break up. This is followed by a harsh relapse for Mae, in which she engages herself in a drug- and sex-fueled binge to cope with her problems. All this considered, Mae isn’t perfect, but nobody is.
The show doesn’t try to sugarcoat the fact that people have issues, and these issues aren’t always pretty. Drug addiction and dishonesty are just a few real issues that many people have. However, these issues don’t make someone a bad person. You can’t simply judge a person for a few mistakes they’ve made, and that’s the point Feel Good really gets across.
Feel Good is a binge-worthy and honest Netflix series. It highlights just how human we all are, and reminds us with humor that we are not perfect.