The premise of Still Up, a new romantic comedy series from Apple TV+, is all charm. Insomniac best friends Danny (Craig Roberts) and Lisa (Antonia Thomas) stay up night after night, talking to each other about everything and nothing. Everything, that is, except their true feelings for one another.
Every night when it gets dark, agoraphobic journalist Danny and London mum Lisa video call and message each other as naturally, and reflexively, as breathing. When Lisa has to source calamine lotion for her daughter’s chicken pox, she brings the video Danny with her to the all-night chemist. When Danny has a date over for dinner, Lisa’s right there on the end of his phone. And when Danny confesses that his last relationship was three years ago, Lisa sets him up with an online dating profile. The website instantly matches them together, with a compatibility rating of 91 per cent.
The opening credits give us delicate music, and lights blurring and fading into the night. With its central question of will they/ won’t they, and innovative camerawork replicating the reality of modern relationships, Still Up nods to both When Harry Met Sally and to Peep Show. Two people talking, unfiltered, in a world where everyone else is going to sleep – it sounds wonderful.
So it’s a real shame that it doesn’t quite come together. Thomas plays Lisa with real sweetness, while Roberts’s Danny is dryly amusing, if at times frustratingly low energy. But listening to the two banter (“If you had to live without a body part, what would it be?”), I remained uncharmed.
This is, in part, because the world the pair inhabit has been made needlessly wacky. We only see Danny confined to his flat, where he is forced to battle a pigeon, look after an enormous dog, and inadvertently host a birthday party for cats. It’s all a bit cartoonish, and worse, unfunny.
Lisa’s dull partner Veggie (Blake Harrison) makes videos called things like “Unboxing for Unboxers” and reads a book rather too obviously joke-titled The History of Bricks. The big visual gags – a pizza being fed through a window slice by floppy slice, or (more disturbingly) a woman’s finger being severed – don’t grow organically from the plot, but instead seem crowbarred-in to liven things up.
All this is indicative of a more serious problem, which is that while the whole idea is that we watch two people gradually, meanderingly and unwittingly fall in love, the writers seem unable to believe that this deepening nighttime relationship alone can sustain a half-hour episode, so punctuate conversations with illustrative flashbacks (often to the daytime) that jolt the tone.
A new British comedy on a global streamer is something to celebrate, and a contemporary rom com is always welcome. The cast is enthusiastic and the two leads share some genuine chemistry – which is especially impressive given that they are kept almost entirely apart. But Still Up is like sitting in the pub watching two friends flirt: nice for them, but you kind of want to make your excuses and leave.