Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wellmania’ On Netflix, About A Woman Who Tries To Get Healthy, Even If It Kills Her (2024)

Getting healthy sucks. All the stuff that’s fun is bad for you, and there aren’t many of us who get off on juice cleanses and boot camps. A new Australian dramedy has one woman who lives like she’s in her 20s despite being at the cusp of 40, and what she decides to do when that wild life catches up with her.

WELLMANIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Sirens are heard. “SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.” A woman suddenly wakes up on a gurney in the back on an ambulance. She has an oxygen mask on and dried blood on her head.

The Gist: Liv Healy (Celeste Barber) is surprised to find herself there, and tries to get out of the moving ambulance; the paramedics have to sedate her.

Two days earlier, in New York. Liv is having sex after she and her date snorted a couple of lines. She boots him out, telling him that she’s going back to Australia for the weekend for the 40th birthday party for friend Amy Kwan (JJ Fong). “Existence is random. Life is short. If you’re not making the most of every moment, what’s the f*cking point?” she tells him when he says her life is intense.

That’s Liv’s life philosophy, and it’s seemingly paying off. She shows up for a party being thrown by Banquet magazine, where she works as a well-respected food critic. The show is creating a Top Chef-like TV show and she’s being considered for one of the judge spots. Her boss wants her on the show, but feels she needs to do a big, viral story to make her better-known to an audience outside the food industry.

She immediately flies off to Sydney, surprises Amy at her party, and immediately falls through a glass table as she makes a toast. The next day, she gets her bag stolen, which includes her green card; Amy pulls some strings to get her an appointment at the US Consulate to get her travel documents. Then Liv visits her mother Lorraine (Genevieve Mooy) and brother Gaz (Lachlan Buchanan), who is planning a wedding; Gaz and his fiance Dalbert (Remy Hii) want her to be there, but Liv is so fixated on being a TV food show judge, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to make it.

Amy wants to invite Liv to a ceremony for a journalism award she’s up for, but she regrets that plan when Liv tells off every media type that rejected her before her move to New York. She then snorts a couple of lines in the bathroom.

Liv goes to the consulate but passes out as she’s trying to get her documents. The doctor who evaluates travelers shows Liv her horrible numbers and tells her she can’t approve her travel back to the US. Liv vows to get healthier in a month, not the year the doctor suggests.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Wellmania has a similar vibe to Enlightened, mainly because the main subject is a woman who tries damn hard to get better, even if it’s extremely difficult to do so.

Our Take:

Celeste Barber is funny as Liv, who not only thinks this TV judge gig is the chance of a lifetime, but has somehow become too big for her britches in the fantasy-for-2023 world of magazine food criticism. But she truly thinks she can continue to live the way she’s living as she gets into her 40s, and she’s completely deluded even after she passes out at the consulate.

She’s even going to be deluded into thinking she can quickly undo what has taken a quarter century or so to build. And she’s going to try everything possible to help her along. Fasts, cleanses, workouts, diets. It’ll be funny to see her laid out just as much by what’s supposed to help her as what hurt her.

We’re hoping that the support around her, from Amy and her husband, Liv’s mom and brother, as well as others, will get a little more character development, so we can see them building Liv up, keeping her honest, and not feeding her ego. We know that Amy, who’s proud of her work, feels that Liv is big-timing her because she’s been successful in New York, so we get a little more depth there. We’ve got confidence in writers Amy Stewart, Nick Coyle and Romina Accurso that they’ll do just that.

Sex and Skin: Liv is having sex when we meet her in New York, but for some reason she has her bra on.

Most Pilot-y Line: Liv’s family doctor mentions that she must enjoy visiting her dad. “Dad’s been dead for 24 years, and as his doctor, that’s either one hell of a misdiagnosis or you know something I don’t.” He shrugs it off by saying, “I don’t know what I was thinking.” We’re not sure if this is going to pay off later or if this is a one-off joke. Either way, it doesn’t land.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Wellmania has the potential to get silly, but Barber looks like she can pull off Liv’s journey to get healthy, or at least healthy enough to get her back to her old life — if that’s what she really wants.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.