The pilot was a bit rough round the edges but I am beginning to like this

Gives me hives.

Thought the second episode was better than the first. Yes, it's hugely exaggerated but the scenarios are highly recognisable. Prefer the main actors and characters rather than the actual script.

Think I recognise the school exterior (though many schools look similar to be fair and could be completely off) - looks like one near the Sylvanian Families shop in Finsbury Park.

Lucy Punch as Amanda looks like a young Joanna Lumley.

Kids on sitcoms are normally portrayed as mischievous but cute and saying funy things. Despite the title on Motherland they hardly even feature and it highlights the self absorption of the parents and none of them are portrayed sympathetically. The only vaguely likable one is Cunk and even she drops the kids in a whisper for the outside chance of date with a bloke whose wallet she found.

Msdarkhorse was telling me with horror that a youngster at the office had told her she thought she resembled the Anna Maxwell Martin character.

I think she was hoping for some reassurance this was a mistaken observation.

I've watched the first four so far. They're entertaining, but none of them seem to be quite as good as the pilot was. The writers appear to have knocked some of the more chaotic edges off Diane Morgan's character, and also turned the stay-at-home dad into an exaggeratedly wet lettuce. He's almost Frank Spencer-like in his ineptitude.

The Sylvanian Families shop in Finsbury Park

Whoa! Googles.

How awesomely bizarre.

He's almost Frank Spencer-like in his ineptitude.

I was thinking exactly that, maybe because I saw an episode of some mothers do have them the other week but his wimpiness is a bit overdone. I did laugh at him taking umbrage at the other dad on scene but some of that was a bit more subtle.

I'm glad the kids don't really feature in this - it's about the mums.

Like in real life.

Its not really about the joys of chikdhood, more about how irritating the litle tykes are and then there other peoples kids who are really annoying.

Likewise, her husband only ever features on the phone.

I was amused by the absent hubby.

In the first ep in a bar on a footie trip, in the second kart racing, “a boring team building thing”.

Her mum is great too, especially the pool confrontation "don't you swim away from me"

I have mixed feelings about this. I've seen 2.

I don't like the 'all mums are bitches who hate each other' vibe of it - seems to me an anti-woman thing, and my experience is that mothers usually support each other. OTOH, I have come across (much less exaggerated) versions of the situations they depict, and I can recognise the relationship to real life.

Sharon Horgan described it as showing the “dirty side” of being a parent

“I’m amazed that the BBC let us do whatever we wanted; there’s no sugar-coating it.

“There’s no, ‘Right, in this episode can you make sure you give your daughter her five-a-day’.

“It’s just showing the sort of… hell of it.

“We actually did a really early version of it in the US for ABC but it didn’t work because we were monitored so heavily and weren’t able to show the dirty side of parenting.”

https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/entertainment/2
017/10/31/news/sharon-horgan-parenting-not-sugar-coated-on-motherland-1175562/

I don't think the women all hate each other and do support one another - her mate saved the party in episode one, for example. It's more that it's about people who aren't mates per se but thrown together by circumstance and may or may not then become friends, and that the playground antics and queen bee types etc persist - which they do IRL.

Yeah - Bad Moms doesn't appeal at all, for example, Arjuna.

The lack of sugar-coating is hugely brutalising. Those £1.5 million pound Queens Park houses don't buy themselves, you know. Or Is the whopping amount of privilege on display part of the satire?