Frayed is a 2019 series created by and starring Sarah Kendall. It is a joint British-Australian co-production and broadcast on Sky in the UK and on the ABC in Australia.
Set in 1988, Simone Burbeck (Kendall) is a wealthy housewife living a lavish life in London when the sudden death of her husband in bizarre circumstances brings everything to a halt. She finds that her husband is heavily indebted and has to sell her house and all her assets to cover the debts; faced with no money to her name, she is forced to relocate herself, her teenage son Leonard "Lenny" (Frazer Hadfield), and daughter Tess (Maggie Ireland-Jones) to her hometown of Newcastle, Australia. It is when she is confronted with a frosty reception from her mother Jean (Kerry Armstrong), brother Jim (Ben Mingay), and other hometown folk that we find out that her actual name is Sammy Cooper, who skipped town 20 years earlier after the unexpected drowning of her father. Sammy then is forced to confront the ghosts of her past life whilst balancing a demeaning administrative job with local MP Chris George (George Houvardas) and the fight to keep her house in London.
Frayed streams on HBO Max in North America.
This show provides examples of:
- The '80s: Frayed is set mainly in 1988 Newcastle and London and it is most visible in the fashion, the technology (large mobile phones), and cultural references (Jim's obsession with the US soap Dynasty (1981)). Towards the end of Series 2, the devastating 1989 earthquake
is even depicted, with both recreated scenes and with archival news footage. Creator Sarah Kendall chose the 1980s setting partly because that is when she grew up and partly because it would be in a much easier setting for someone to set up an entirely new life on the other side of the globe away from the smartphone and social media era, where somebody's background is a press of a button away. - '80s Hair: Fittingly for the time setting, most people sport large hair in keeping with popular 80s fashion.Sammy: Does my hair really look that boofy?
- Abusive Parents: Terry Harris turns out to be a domestic abuser: keeping a close watch on his daughter and physically harming her when she does not keep to her curfew.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- A literal gun - in S1E3, Tess finds air rifles among the junk stored in the basement. She, Lenny, and Jim play around with them, and when Sammy scolds the three of them, Jim claims that they are not loaded, only for his gun to go off immediately. In the Series 1 finale, Abby grabs one of the air rifles and threatens her abusive father. There is a scuffle between her, Lenny, and Terry, and Terry ends up being shot in the living room by that gun.
- As one of the demeaning tasks she is given by Chris, Sammy has to clear out a lot (used as a dumping ground) next to Chris's office building so that they can make way for a new car park. The car park has been constructed in the Time Skip between Series 1 and 2, and we learn in S2E6 that Sammy and Jim have hidden Terry's body underneath the car park, and his body is unearthed by the earthquake that hits Newcastle and breaks up the car park concrete.
- Distinction Without a Difference:Sammy: If he's making this kind of money by lying to everyone, we're entitled to a slice of it. It's called hush money.
Fiona: You're gonna blackmail him?
Sammy: No! I'm not gonna blackmail him. I'm just gonna go to Sydney with him and I'm gonna demand money in return for not telling anyone what he's really doing.
Fiona: That's the exact definition of blackmail! - Manchild: Sammy's brother Jim still behaves like an immature teenager, living at home with his mother and using Dynasty (1981) as a life manual.
- Naturalized Name: Chris George is a Greek-Australian who changed his ethnic name to pursue his career in politics.Chris: Christos Georgiadis kept losing elections. Chris George? Won by a landslide.
- Off the Wagon: Jean skips out on her AA meetings to go on dates with Peter, and on a particularly disastrous date at a vineyard in which she finds out that Peter is not interested in a monogamous relationship, she breaks 12 years of sobriety and gets so drunk that she causes a scene and she has to be picked up by Sammy and Jim.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Played for both drama and laughs. Mrs. Atkins suffers from dementia and her memory of Dan and Sammy are as of teenagers, and she often wanders out of the house to familiar older locations like the shuttered post office. In Series 2, she is eventually moved into a care home.
- Sibling Rivalry: Never mind that both of them are approaching middle age, Sammy and Jim often descend into petty and immature arguments that Jean often has to defuse. They even start a bar brawl during which (amongst other things) Jim has drawn a penis on his sister's face.
- Sleazy Politician: Chris George is the local MP for Newcastle, and while he is a Mean Boss to Sammy, Fiona, and Sammy's predecessor, behaves like a petty tyrant in the office, accepts bribes from powerful businessmen, and solicits sexual favours from his employees, he does hold a genuine belief that his machinations will help to raise Newcastle out of economic depression and spur investment into its dying coal industry.
- Undignified Death: Simone/Sammy's husband Nick dies of a heart attack... while high on a concoction of drugs (including cough medicine because he had a cough), undergoing erotic asphyxiation with a hired prostitute, and with a telephone shoved into a certain orifice. The last detail is also why it took several minutes for emergency services to respond. It does get played for drama briefly when the rumour surrounding Nick's death spreads around the kids school and they get bullied (One of Tess's classmates made a crude clay figurine of her dad with the phone).
