Jez Butterworth’s ‘Mammals’ and the evolution of the TV marriage

Marriage has been a staple subject of scripted television almost since the form was established. For decades, it was played mostly for laughs, with any marital rifts treated with censorious moralising. But recently, as the nature of marriage itself has broadened, so too has TV’s depiction of the institution. Its complexities have become a focal point rather than a subplot filtered through courtroom thriller (The Undoing), lurid melodrama (The Affair) or flippant comedy (too many sitcoms to mention).

This year alone has offered several series demonstrating this evolution. The latest seasons of the Martin Freeman-led comedy-drama Breeders, and Nick Hornby’s chamber piece State of the Union have followed Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s superb Catastrophe in intelligently probing the attritional impact of time and children on long-term partnerships.

Amazon Prime’s new comedy-drama Mammals offers an alternative serio-comic take on a newer but still imperilled relationship, picking apart the union of Michelin-starred chef Jamie (James Corden) and market researcher Amandine (Melia Kreiling). The show’s creator, playwright Jez Butterworth, made no bones about its clear-eyed appraisal at the outset: “A good marriage is the most magical thing. In a world of 8bn, you’ve found the one who gets you, ignites your body and soul . . . You’re also never going to have sex with anyone else, ever, and then you’re going to die.”

Corden reflects on one of the things that makes the series universal: “It’s a story about four characters who are all flawed, how they react to each other’s flaws and mistakes and to their own,” says the actor and talk-show host, who last week made headlines for troubles of his own — an angry confrontation in a high-end New York restaurant that resulted in him being briefly banned.

He says of his character: “Jamie is at peak happiness. He’s on a babymoon with his wife in Cornwall, the weather’s amazing and he feels like he’s winning in life. Then, five minutes later, his entire world changes thanks to two catastrophes [his wife’s affair and subsequent miscarriage]. I love the idea of somebody trying to keep a lid on this thing that’s tightening his chest, building up and up. And at no point does he even consider his own behaviour.”

Earlier this year, the BBC drama Marriage took considerable risks in examining a 30-year union whose bickering and silences, comfortable or otherwise, were underpinned by the bond of shared grief. Embracing the non sequitur and takes of sometimes discomfiting length, it immersed the viewer in the couple’s closed world.

Butterworth goes further still. His previous series Britannia, a hallucinatory reimagining of a nation torn between Celtic tradition and Roman society, showed that he is as comfortable demolishing conventional thinking and narrative on screen as he is on stage. Mammals does something similar with the romcom, weaving in magic realism, thriller elements and a cameo from Tom Jones, whom Butterworth casts as “the patron saint of the Away Game — living a life that has had it emphatically both ways”.

Every narrative strand interrogates an aspect of relationships and monogamy as Jamie and Amandine’s relationship unravels alongside that of his sister Lue (Sally Hawkins) and brother-in-law Jeff (Colin Morgan). She seeks refuge in a fantasy world while he immerses himself in his work as a professor of veterinary neurology, specialising in the differing sexual habits of prairie and mountain voles.

“The show examines marriage as a standardised form of a relationship,” says Morgan. “Prairie voles essentially do the same thing without that construct — they mate for life. Yet, in Jeff’s experiments, if one of them has alcohol, it becomes promiscuous. Put that into our world and promiscuity is a crime to a marriage. But to prairie voles, it’s natural behaviour. So is it natural behaviour that we label as wrong?”

Kreiling emphasises that Mammals takes a non-judgmental approach. “I grew up in a very untraditional environment,” she says. “There were divorces and half-siblings, it was very extended, so this felt very natural. There is so much room to start exploring other ways of existing — they may not be comfortable, but they do happen. Instead of hiding things away, Amandine is creating confrontation . . . It’s is not necessarily easy, but it is healthy.”

Along with voles, whales are another recurring motif in the series, not least when Amandine gives Jamie a copy of her favourite book, Moby-Dick, early in their courtship. Marital bliss as the great white whale?

Does all of this — the depiction in Mammals and the other recent series — add up to a cynical take on marriage?

“I don’t personally have a jaundiced view of it and I’m not sure I’d want to watch something that did,” says Butterworth. “I have a wonder-filled, thrilled and baffled view of the whole thing. It’s not trying to tar everyone with the same brush, it’s trying to play on the edge of the magic and difficulty of it all.”

He cites an illuminating example from his own life. “While we were on a ski trip, a friend discovered that his partner had been unfaithful. We all went out to an ice-skating rink and she suddenly appeared doing Salchows and all that. He said to me, ‘I didn’t know she could skate either.’ It was so beautiful. We were both in floods of tears.”

It is this emotional complexity that he has tried to capture in Mammals. “I want that to be the spirit of this story. Something numinous and magical occurs if you break the bonds of the tawdry, soap-opera qualities of somebody discovering that their wife’s been unfaithful. A relationship that has been going wrong for years can all change because of a single conversation.”

Mammals director Stephanie Laing acknowledges HBO’s 2021 series Scenes from a Marriage as one of TV’s smartest and most incisive relationship dramas. An update of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series (which allegedly caused a rise in Sweden’s divorce rate), it used a variety of candid to-camera conversations to pitilessly dissect a failing partnership.

Laing argues Mammals offers a continuing evolution of marriage on TV, driven by the flexibility and ambition of streaming services. “It’s refreshing to not have to tell a story in a box,” she says. “Audiences are smart, they’re out there having these relationships . . . I don’t think directing Mammals has turned me against marriage, rather it’s reinforced the idea that love is important, however rocky and scary it gets.”

‘Mammals’ is on Amazon Prime from November 11

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