It takes a lot of confidence to start off a comedy with your lead character’s wife being run over right in front of him.
Not to mention, they had just come from a parent-teacher meeting where they were told their daughter was streaming “horrendous porn” in front of the entire class. And throughout the meeting, Sam (Baz Ashmawy) was clearly more interested in the content of the porn (“was it… animals?") than the offence itself.
Having just seen his wife hit by an ice cream van while giving him the finger (her finals words were to call him a “useless man”), Sam is now a single parent. And as he’s the kind of parent who can’t even tell his three daughters – oldest Lina (Suzie Seweify), middle child Layla (Noor Salem), and youngest Nancy (Carmen Rose) – that their mother is dead without completely messing it up, they all have a very tough road ahead of them.
Sam (Baz Ashmawy) with youngest daughter Nancy (Carmen Rose). Credit: Grand Pictures / Finn Boylan
There’s a lot going on in Faithless. Partly it’s a look at a man who’s forced to finally step up and take responsibility, only to discover that good intentions aren’t enough to pay the bills. Partly it’s a heartful take on coping with grief, set in an Ireland that hasn’t quite got its head around diversity.
And mostly it’s just a whole lot of really good gags; when someone calls a messed-up situation “the ISIS on the cake” – and then says it again to make sure everyone got the joke – you know you’re watching a finely tuned comedy machine.
Ashmawy, who’s best known in Ireland as a radio and television presenter (he won an international Emmy for his series 50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy), spent six years working on the scripts for this series. It shows, both in the quality of the jokes and the way each episode can shift its mood in an instant. This is a comedy where one minute Sam is tearfully telling his dead wife that “this family doesn’t work without you” and the next he’s putting sunglasses on the corpse because his clumsy attempt to fix her makeup has left her with one eye jammed open.
It’s also loosely autobiographical; not so much with the dead wife side of things, but in its look at the struggles faced by an Irish man of Egyptian heritage who keeps finding the pieces of his life don’t quite fit together.
Zein (Amir El-Masry) and Sam (Baz Ashmawy). Credit: Grand Pictures / Finn Boylan
Now left to raise three daughters, Sam is in the kind of situation where you really need your family. And Sam’s younger half-brother Zein (Amir El-Masry) arrives at the wake ready to help. Sure, he’s brought along a date he picked up on the flight from London who’s busy taking selfies, and he somehow manages to spill a glass of wine all over the deceased in her coffin, but he’s going to be there for his brother in his hour of need. And by “there”, he means staying in his house, because he’s in no hurry to leave.
The rest of the extended family are a bit of a mixed blessing. His brother-in-law Cormac (Art Campion) decides what the wake needs is a dance session; a later meeting with his distraught father Mo (Raad Rawi) has Sam brushing him off with the line “you’re an upset Muslim man with a backpack; it’s not a great look”.
His mother-in-law Dympna (Eleanor Methven) is easily the most level-headed of the bunch, though that’s not really saying much. But that’s part of what Faithless is getting at - grief and loss comes at all of us, not just the families that have their act together.
So while it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, there’s a (small but heartfelt) serious side to this look at a family trying to keep moving forward after a tragedy. When they spring an impromptu “it’s not an intervention” intervention on Sam because he’s clearly not coping, they don’t do it to make his life worse. They do it because they care.
If he didn’t storm out and end up at home with a wheelie bin on his head, he might be able to see that.
The full season of Faithless is streaming now at SBS On Demand. The season is also airing on SBS VICELAND 9.25pm Mondays from 15 April.
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Faithless
