Finding out that Raised By Wolves Series 1 had been picked up by Channel 4 following its brilliant pilot last year and that there were six episodes waiting to be watched on 4OD is one of our best discoveries we had in spring 2015, so you should probably brace yourself for a pretty favourable review. However, just because the pilot worked so well doesn’t mean it was guaranteed a great first series, but the good news is that it’s just that with a whole lot of cleverly constructed jokes, puns, one-liners and comedy scenes that will leave you laughing your four bum cheeks off at (you’ll get it when you watch it… honestly).
The first of the six episodes aired on the 16th March 2015 with the rest of Series 1 going out weekly at the same time on Monday nights. It started out with a trip to the local fields for the Garry family as mum Della was keen to get the kids out of the house. Not to give them a little sunshine or fresh air, but to teach them the food foraging skills they’ll need to survive come the apocalypse and it’s by this point you know that the series is going to be just as hilarious as the pilot was.
Set on a council estate on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, it’s a genius sit-com that follows the lives of the fairly large single-parent family, who have shunned the trappings of a conventional upbringing in favour of home schooling. In their case this consists of watching old movies, going on little adventures around Wolverhampton, playing the mini electric keyboard, re-enacting their own version of The X Factor and reading the kind of books you’d expect on an Oxford University English language degree reading list.
Throughout the six episode’s you’ll be able to see Della, who’s a socialist free-thinking rebel mum with a number of personal causes, planning water hose attacks on her neighbour’s cat’s backside to keep it out of the recently built veg patch; eldest daughter Germaine’s ongoing lust for local lout Lee Rhind; the ginger intelligentsia that is second daughter Aretha being traumatised by visions of Grampy and sh*t nan’s afternoon delight; third daughter Yoko accidentally acing video game excellence with her eyes shut; only son Wyatt finding solace in the quiet oblivion of a cardboard box; and the brilliantly named youngest daughter Mariah using the ferocity of her death stare to manipulate a vanilla slice out of her poor unsuspecting Grampy.
If that doesn’t give you enough to go on, we don’t know what will, so off you go before the apocalypse sets in and check out the exceptionally funny first series of Raised By Wolves for yourself. You might want to watch the pilot first, if you haven’t already seen it, and all of the episodes were available on 4OD, last time we looked, but they’ll only be available initially for a month after the air date of the final episode on the 21st April 2015 (they were still on there last time we looked, so it’s worth double checking).
Though it’s a family sitcom, it’s got more edge than a U2 gig on the white cliffs of Dover and every now and again it’s going to go beyond the threshold of your tolerance levels, but on the whole it’s a very funny first series. It’s got some of the best one-liners and puns we’ve heard all year and there’s plenty of infinitely quotable material, which will see it going down as a classic left-field Channel 4 sitcom. Good work the Moran sisters who co-wrote the show based on their own childhood in Wolverhampton, especially with the news that the success of the first full outing has been met by confirmation by Channel 4 that they will be airing Raised By Wolves Series 2 in 2016.
Raised By Wolves Series 1 review: 4.4/5
