What does an alcoholic look like? That is the question at the root of Nancy Harris’s The Dry, the tyrannically tragic, black comedy tracking every move of Shiv (Róisín Gallagher), a 35-year-old artist returning to Dublin from years spent in London, making a series of poor decisions in order to cloud the hypersensitivity she battles with daily.

First aired by Britbox in the UK and from March 1 on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player, The Dry, centres around the five members of the Sheridan family, caustic and unforgiving all the while boasting a familiarity that resembles home, as they begrudgingly deal with their sister, daughter and lifelong trainwreck Shiv’s journey to sobriety. At just eight episodes, the show is a precision black-humour mechanism, a warped and affecting fable about sobriety amidst systemic dysfunction, chronicling our lead’s original desire: to gain relief from her own plotline. 

Shiv (Siobhán by birth, but prefers Shiv––an act which lends itself to a glimpse into her upbringing; never taking oneself entirely seriously) introduces herself at first as a woman in wavering control of her own story: an urbane singleton, living in London, returning home to attend her grandmother’s wake. Her features are soft and vulnerable, but cracks quickly appear. Her eyes are black-lined, her clothes ill-fitting, her fingernails painted green.

Shiv has reasons to be miserable; her grandmother, a source of sober inspiration during her darkest times, has died; she was sacked from her art gallery job for sleeping there in an attempt to curb her at-home drinking; and the man with which she was in love, a punitive manipulator played excellently by Moe Dunford, is back in her life. She remains, too, at odds with her sister, Caroline (Siobhán Cullen), an uptight and menacing presence, permanently dressed for martyred corporate success, undermining her in a way that feels like the swift and unemotional uppercutting of a family member sick of shouldering the burdens of others.

Crucially, Shiv is also mourning the life she imagined for herself at 35, the cloying age that women are told to decision-make and plan for, teetering on the knife-edge of wavering sexuality and motherhood, moral failure or dutiful domesticity. The truth is, no matter how much Shiv attempts to seduce a less-flawed way of living, starting with herself, the acknowledgement of her flaws in the first place acts as an uncomfortable reflection on those who surround her (for context, as of 2022, Ireland has the second-highest rate of binge-drinking in Europe).

Roisin Gallagher as Shiv in The Dry

As a result, the difficult issues aren’t discussed, because those around her are both repulsed and drawn to the way those issues act as something to be reckoned with, a game they helplessly try to win. A telling and clever theatrical mechanism of both Harris and director Paddy Breathnach (Vikings, Rosie, Man About Dog), a for-television performance that proves the call is coming from inside the house. 

The Dry, took eight years to come together, and six before it was filmed. It didn’t come about in one exacting way, Harris tells me over the phone from London. “I’ve had people around me experience addiction, recovery and sobriety and I wanted to write a family drama about how when you have a relationship with someone who has an addiction, it affects you too, in ways you mightn’t have even considered. When you’re not an addict, you don’t think you’re affected––but you definitely are.”

Hailing from a theatrical background––Harris was selected for the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2012, a grant won in recent years by Seán Hewitt and Doireann Ní Ghríofa––her work has been lauded for her collision of character and circumstance, something she employs throughout The Dry. Her sharp understanding of the Irish family and its relationship with selflessness and selfishness is breathtaking, leaving the audience to pick up the shameful pieces none of the characters wish to deal with. She employs this in a series of cutting, incomplete sentences, a conscious decision to acknowledge the acknowledgeable.

“So many things in life sit in the subtext,” she says, taking a beat. She lives in the pauses. “I wanted to show that they’re at the funeral, but that’s not the death they’re grieving.” There are several unspoken layers that are never mentioned. One of the most confronting scenes in The Dry, among the most comedic, is when Shiv attends her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a plush South Dublin school hall. Patrons rush in from pilates classes, bringing Avoca biscuit bars and wearing cashmere scarves. “You don’t look like alcoholics,” she recalls to sympathetic laughs.

“We have this idea that alcoholics lay in the street with a bottle in their hand, and that’s just not the truth,” Harris shares. “There are so many versions and permeations of alcoholism, many of which are so laced in shame and judgement, especially on those living in poverty. We liken it to a defect in character and a moral failing, whereas someone in a big house, with nice clothes and a powerful job, seems to get away with not being labelled.” 

Nancy Harris.

Harris’s understanding hails from a personal experience. She committed to sobriety for a year, attending festivals, dates and nights out as normal, as friends and others commented on her decision in witheringly disassociating ways. “It taught me how isolating the process can be, and for me, it was just something I wanted to do, I can only imagine what it would be like for someone with an actual problem.”

The creative impulse for The Dry, thus, came from a personal interest, but is inherently non-biographical. It’s a question that female writers and creatives deal with in a way that men don’t; that the process behind women-centric writing is entirely focused on the intrapersonal, and could never set pace beyond themselves.

Whereas men deal with topics of the world at large, never considered to be reliant on the soft power of emotions. “It feels like a sort of sexism to suggest that this is just my story,” she laughs. “We all start with an idea, but female characters like Shiv are often labelled with the ‘messy heroine’ trope. It feels like an emotional cul-de-sac. And, what’s the alternative? Are we all supposed to be clean, powerful, emotionless lawyers sitting behind desks?”

The Dry appears at the crest of a years-long wave of, as Harris puts it, ‘messy heroine’ tragicomedies; GIRLS, I Hate Suzie, I Will Destroy You, Fleabag, Broad City. It’s both a welcome phenomenon (“we’ve had centuries of not being allowed to say anything, who cares if we want to talk periods now?”) and an affronting, box-ticking exercise in embarrassment. World-weariness may come in the form of overexposure to septic comedies unravelling ribbons of misogyny, female pain, graphic sex scenes and medical misogyny, but The Dry, caters to its female leads with equal parts care, absolution and pathos.

By the final episode, which I won’t spoil but will say touches on themes of forgiveness, Shiv’s story feels richer than the sum of its parts. In the closing sequences, our helpless protagonist’s choices prove sobering in more ways than one, exposing the merciful story hidden many layers beneath the cruel one.

The Dry continues on Wednesday, March 8 on RTÉ One with all episodes streaming on RTÉ Player.