Rebecca Root

Review: Boy Meets Girl

Rebecca Root has charisma but I doubt even she can drag this poorly thought-out affair along by sheer force of personality alone.

Boy Meets Girl started life as the winning script in a competition to find a comedy that portrayed transgender characters in a positive light. The majority of the press I'd read about Boy Meets Girl focused on the casting of real life transgender actress Rebecca Root and how groundbreaking the show was fore featuring her in a prominent role. So I was more than surprised to learn that Boy Meets Girl was rather a traditional romantic comedy that used Root's Judy's gender transition to explain why she's been so lonely for most of her life. Creator Elliott Kerrigan and co-writer Simon Carlyle made sure that Judy and her love interest Leo (Harry Hemple) both felt like well-rounded characters and by the end of the first episode I felt I'd got to know them sufficiently well. Crucially both Judy and Leo were likeable and relatable characters whose romance made sense despite the fact that she was significantly older than him. Any of the scenes in which these two characters were on screen together were incredibly warm with the majority of the comedy stemming for realistic situations. Both Hemple and Root were brilliant in portraying Leo and Judy as lonely characters who were looking for love and who had seemingly found it with one another. If Boy Meets Girl does have any negative qualities then its in the supporting characters most notably Leo's annoying brother James (Jonny Dixon) and his overbearing mother Pam (Denise Welch). However I feel that Kerrigan and Carlyle have time to let us get to know these characters a little more as the series progresses and I'm not going to judge his presentation of secondary characters too harshly in an opening instalment that had plenty of plot to whiz through. When it's at its best Boy Meets Girl evokes memories of Gavin and Stacey and whilst Kerrigan's comedy may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as that comedy classic its certainly as warm and genuine. I'm just hoping that Boy Meets Girl gets better as it goes on as after episode one I already think it might be one of my comedies of the year.

A game-changing new sitcom, mixing a sherbet-sweet, Gavin & Stacey-style plot with not-so-typical leads: transgender woman Judy (Rebecca Root) and her younger suitor Leo (Harry Hepple). In this opening episode, the first hurdle for the new pairing isn't gender-related - rather, it's that Leo's mum is fuming at their 14-year age gap. After E4's LGBT anthology Banana featured a transgender character humiliated by her ex, it's refreshing to see a more positive trans-themed story on TV, and an adorable one at that.

Radio Times review

Boy Meets Girl is a comedy, but you probably won't laugh aloud. Though equally probably you might end up wearing a soppy smile, because it's a sweet, thoroughly modern love story.

Leo (Harry Hepple), jobless and still living at home in Newcastle with his parents and his slacker brother, meets an older woman, Judy, in a bar. The attraction is instant, she's funny and friendly, and Leo falls head first.

But on their first date, Judy (Rebecca Root) throws a surprise into the conversation. As Boy Meets Girl is clearly anxious to be seen as a romance, rather than any kind of trailblazer, it feels, from time to time, a bit slender. But the leads will win you over.

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