The Joyful Redemption of <em>Back to Life</em>

While 2019 has been a banner year for comically devastating TV heroines imported from Britain, Miri Matteson, the hero of the new Showtime series Back to Life, is so distinctive that to clump her in with the Fleabags and the Sharons, the Aines or even the Alices, feels like a disservice. Created and played by Daisy Haggard, Miri is impossibly kind and ineffably optimistic. She’s also just been released from an 18-year prison sentence for a crime that’s unspecified at the show’s outset, but is serious enough to compel Miri’s mother (Geraldine James) to hide the kitchen knives the day she gets home.

The question of forgiveness was very much on Haggard’s mind when she was writing the show, the.) “Obviously there are some things that people do and ways people behave that you can never forgive,” she said. “But I’d say I believe in second chances, and I am a forgiver.” Her desire with Miri was to create someone whom society had labeled a bad person, but whose actions and instincts complicated that judgment. “It was about presenting a human rather than what we often do, which is stamp somebody with the thing they’ve done wrong.”