Series 4 of Trying shifts the focus onto Nikki and Jason’s adoptive kids with little real success
“Apparently it’s unnecessary and performative”
In this era of multitudinous streaming services, it is mightily impressive for any show to make it to a fourth series, particularly on the very limited audience share that AppleTV+ manages to reach. Such is the case though for Andy Wolton’s Trying, a British comedy show which started off hugely charming in its first and second series of thirty-something Camdenites Nikki and Jason trying to start their family.
Its third series saw them manage to expand their family group but in doing so, lost some of its acerbic bite that made it stand out from the crowd. And sad to say, this new fourth series sees it continue down a path of treacly sweetness which feels a real disappointment as it foregrounds the trials and tribulations of their (pesky) kids at the expense of saying anything truly interesting about the challenges of adoptive parenthood.
Starting with a time-jump of six years and a teased-out death of a character, Princess and Tyler are now moody teenagers (Scarlett Rayner and Cooper Turner respectively) and the show is focused on them. Rafe Spall’s Jase is determined to make Tyler’s football dreams come true even though he’s a crap player, and Esther Smith’s Nikki is tiptoeing around Princess’ desires to know more about the birth mother who abandoned them.
Neither storyline really has enough oomph to make them effective lead narrative drivers, hampered by the fact that we’re having to get used to two new actors as the kids who are effectively brand new characters. It doesn’t help that in support, the excellent Siân Brooke is marooned with shrewish writing as Nikki’s sister Karen and weird plot developments with husband Scott (the ever-game Darren Boyd).
Overall, it feels like a marked decline for the show, in keeping with Series 3, in that having given its main characters what they really wanted, it no longer knows what kind of stories it should be telling. It doesn’t feel like a Series 5 should be in the offing, no matter how many cliffhangers they shove into its final scenes.
