Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Wellmania is a fun show that skims along the surface of the wellness industry, poking at how shallow it all can be and showcasing the hypocrisy of still participating in it with no genuine intention.
Liv is forced to rethink her “live fast, die young” philosophy after a major health scare. She throws herself into a wellness journey in an attempt to reclaim her old life, which just seems to slip further and further away.
I love that the protagonist is an older woman still finding her way in life. It’s good to get the message out there that life isn’t over at 30 or even 40.
Liv’s struggles are really relatable (even if how she goes about it is more on the absurd side for the sake of comedy) because the motions she puts herself through are something many women are intimately familiar with; that relentless drive to try an fit into a mould which seems to shrink and become more impossible by the minute.
Liv is narcissistic to the point of being obnoxious.
But where this could have easily been nothing but low-brow humour, this show is actually smart, hilarious, dramatic and sentimental as it delves deeper into how Liv got to where she is today.
Wellmania had be chuckling and nodding along often.
I love that they centre family relationships and friendships, at least so far, because there is such a huge emphasis on romantic relationships in media in general. And the approach to these non-romantic relationships is very down to earth and real.
Nobody’s perfect, but we muddle along anyway.
This is a kind of homage to 90s romcom, though in episodic format and through trope subversion (when compared to 90s romcom).
There were two things that stuck with me after the season; one was Liv and Amy hashing out that “would we be friends if we met today?” thing, which was beautifully concluded. And two, the speech Liv never got to give at her brother’s wedding. That had me in tears.
I do think this will go down better with the women in the audience (I had a peek at the 1-star reviews and — as with Pretend It’s A City — it’s mostly men complaining about the show being about a woman (a similar show about a man would not have garnered some of the comments this did), centring on female issues and the experiences of women (which the low ratings found unrelatable and frivolous), highlighting the struggles of a woman (they didn’t think it was “entertainment worthy”), and a focus on more mundane things, like the struggle of familial relationships and maintaining a friendship (wasn’t as worthy of a story to be told than something more “intellectual”).
Is Wellmania the experience of every woman? No. But it does examine the image of women portrayed in the media and how the pursuit of that can be all-consuming, exhausting and just down right bad for your mental health.
I’ll definitely be waiting for season two, if nothing else than to see another stellar performance from Barber, because clearly she’s not afraid to show us the “unfeminine”, “ugly” and plainly very real.
PS — If you didn’t know, Celeste Barber is a stand-up comedian and I did watch her Netflix special Fine, Thanks, but it was only okay. There were a few good jokes in there, mostly I was just bored.
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