TV review: The Walsh Sisters is a Sunday night hug
Jay Duffy stars as Luke and Caroline Menton as Rachel in the TV adaption of The Walsh Sisters, starting on RTÉ One this Sunday at 9.30pm
(RTÉ One and RTÉ Player) isn’t afraid of cliché. Middle-class Dublin family, five sisters, the addicted one, the matronly one, the unhappily divorced one, the happily-engaged-but-not-for-long-one, and the young one still living at home. They’re all here in this flashy new RTE drama based on the series of books by Marian Keyes.
But there is nothing wrong with cliché when it’s well done. And this is well done. This has a lot to do with Stefanie Preissner, who writes and acts here. I’d call her a national treasure but that’s a kind of retirement honour for old-aged actors.
She showed her eye for dialogue and relationships as long ago as Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope. It’s all on view here. To top it off, her character Maggie is the stand-out performance here. And the rest aren’t far behind.
Caroline Menton is Rachel, the addicted sister. She’s funny, feckless, annoying and vulnerable, you are on her side one minute and wishing she’d just shut up and go to rehab the next. Her boyfriend Luke is a bit dreary, but he’s obviously been through the mill with Rachel’s addiction.
Louisa Harland, the wacky one in Derry Girls, is the freshly engaged one here. It’s all very sudden and there is a sense the fiancee is a bad ‘un, not least because he’s American. Harland has this brilliant face that lets just enough of the viewer in to give us a sense she isn’t sure about him either.
Danielle Galligan is freshly divorced Claire, struggling with co-parenting her young daughter.
Nothing much happens in this opening episode, until a bolt from the blue at the end.
That’s alright. There is none of the try-hard plot twisting that made Bad Sisters an unconvincing watch. The Walsh Sisters might be a gentle piece of well-observed drama, but the characters are so well drawn, you’re drawn in anyway.
And it has Carrie Crowley as the mother. Every show should have Carrie Crowley, they should make that a rule. And then they go and cast Aidan Quinn as her husband, the daddy of all the Walshs. He looks very like Don Conroy now, the smiley art guy on Zig and Zag, which is very reassuring for a generation of people who wanted him to be their uncle.
Mix them all together and you’ve got a lovely funny and relatable slice of Irish middle-class life, which is what we’ve come to expect from Marian Keyes.
So get stuck into The Walsh Sisters. It’s a like a Sunday night hug from RTE, and we don’t get enough of those.
