Ellie Heydon

BTS: Merman's Dreamland for Sky

For Merman's new Sky comedy drama, Dreamland, the team headed to Margate to create a show filled with bright seaside colours, but with a dark edge too.

Pippa Considine, Televisual, 13th April 2023

The six-part Dreamland (Sky Atlantic) is based on Sharon Horgan's Bafta-winning 2017 short, Morgana Robinson's Summer. Part-directed by Ellie Heydon and set in Margate, it focuses on a family mainly comprising a mother (Frances Barber), a grandmother (Sheila Reid) and four sisters (including Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Gabby Best - who also writes some episodes).

One sister, Trish (Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman), is so intent on her latest pregnancy producing a girl, she holds a pink-blitzed "mani-festival" party. Into this cerise, hyper-suburban haze arrives fourth sister Mel (Lily Allen). Returning from a job in Paris, swathed in black, smoking ("Wow', just wow," sneers Trish, "being a hot mess is very 2019"), nervy Mel could not be more heavily signalled as the outsider.

While seeming at first to be about knotty family bonds, Dreamland soon becomes about secrets, the most damaging of which is nursed by - wouldn't you know it? - Mel. At first I wasn't sure about this show: it seemed stagey and garish (Margate transformed into a Technicolor riviera). However, as it bobs along, the story gets deeper, more engaging. In a strong cast (also featuring Ghosts's Kiell Smith-Bynoe), Allen holds her own, with just the occasional fawn-eyed quiver into shivering nerves.

Barbara Ellen, The Observer, 9th April 2023