Wellmania review — a dose of Aussie humour helps this wellness comedy (2024)

Wellmania
Netflix
★★★☆☆

The Big Door Prize
Apple TV+
★★★☆☆

The “wellness” industry was ripe for satire long before Gwyneth Paltrow grossed us out with her vagin*l steaming and rectal ozone therapy. But Wellmania, despite trotting us through ludicrous detoxing, juicing, cupping and colon flushing, isn’t primarily about wellness. More its opposite. It is about the psychological make-up of its lead character Liv (a fizzing Celeste Barber), a hard-drinking, co*ke-snorting, casual sex-loving, self-destructive, funny but self-obsessed food writer.

After collapsing during a flying visit to her home country Australia, she attempts to reverse years of partying within four weeks via quick fixes simply to get a green card for the US so she can go back and take up her dream job in New York as a TV show judge.

It reminded me slightly of Sheridan Smith’s Rosie Molloy Gives Up Everything, though it’s not quite as winningly filthy as that. It’s a sort of Fleabag-lite crossed with Miranda, which flits between slapstick and darkness, such as the tragic death of Liv’s father.

Parts of the script work far better than others — I’m not keen on ditzy slapstick; just a personal thing — and there is an over-reliance on fart noises (detox juices, see). Liv’s friend Amy getting her neck caught up in the brown pipe that is stuck up Liv’s backside felt lazy.

Yet in other areas it absolutely sparkles and carries you along, Liv regressing to a selfish teen when forced to live back with her mother for a month and telling a waiter that she is “mourning being on the arse-end side of the world”. The Australian self-deprecatory humour is the best thing about this comedy, along with Barber’s ebullient energy.

The Big Door Prize is about life potential and this comedy itself has the potential to become a Black Mirror-ish satire about what happens when you mess with people’s minds by telling them what the cosmos deems them capable of. Actually, not the cosmos but a $2 machine in a grocery store that reads your handprints and produces a revelatory card that might say, for instance, “magician” or “pop legend”. But it doesn’t fulfil that potential.

It keeps the mood mostly upbeat and feelgood. Chris O’Dowd stars as Dusty, an amiable 40-year-old schoolteacher who rides a (non-motorised) scooter to work in smalltown Deerfield, seems slightly “beta” and has only ever slept with one woman (his extremely beautiful wife Cass, played by Gabrielle Dennis). And it’s a bit schmaltzy.

However, it is a pleasant watch and also a thought-provoking one because it asks whether people are happier knowing about their latent possibilities or if it’s better you remain ignorant and content with your lot. Given the queues that form outside the grocery store, people are hungry to know. With jolly vibes of Ted Lasso, although Dusty is not as interesting a character as Ted IMO, it touches on darkness but brings the viewer back towards the light with decent one-liners.

● I recognise the person in Netflix’s Wellmania — it used to be me

Based on the novel by MO Walsh, it has an interesting premise and some well-drawn characters (O’Dowd is the biggest pull). But I’d love to see how it would have turned out in Charlie Brooker’s hands.

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