Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, Netflix, Preview, TV | Tagged: disney plus, flowers, loki, Marvel Studios, netflix, sophia di martino, sylvie

Flowers: Loki Star Sophia Di Martino's Original Breakthrough Show

British actress Sophia Di Martino is getting all the buzz now as Sylvie, aka a "variant" on Loki on Disney+ right now. US media is going around calling this her breakthrough role in the US. It's certainly her debut on US television, seemingly from out of nowhere. Oddly, hardly any articles in the US mention that she had a breakthrough role on UK Television back in 2016, on a Channel 4 comedy series called Flowers.

Flowers follows the deeply dysfunctional lives of the Flowers family. The patriarch is Maurice Flowers (Julian Barratt), a depressed and unhappy author of a popular children's book series featuring characters called The Grubbs. Maurice lives in a crumbling country cottage with his wife Deborah (Olivia Colman) and his grown twin children, Amy (Di Martino) and Don (Daniel Rigby). Shun, the Japanese illustrator of his books, lives in a shed in the garden – while Maurice's senile mother Hattie lives upstairs… and she's not long for this world. Shun is played by the half-British, half-Japanese creator and writer of the show Will Sharpe.

The Flowers are a family trapped in a deep well of dysfunction. Maurice is depressed to the point of suicidal ideation. His wife Deborah tries to deny and hide her deep unhappiness with a brittle façade of forced cheeriness on the verge of falling apart. The Flowers twins are emotionally stunted adults still living in their parents' house. Di Martino's Amy Flowers looks like a young, depressed Kate Bush. Was she cast because she looked like a young Bush…? Or more that she could play hilarious and messed up at the same time?

Amy is a depressed shut-in who creates dark, Gothic art pieces and music. Her twin brother Don is a self-deluding would-be inventor who mainly glues different devices together to create ridiculous and useless new devices. Daniel Rigby plays Don like a man who never grew up beyond the mental age of 13, trapped in a juvenile fantasy of playing "boy inventor."

Flowers is a far cry from Loki – imagine a sitcom created by Alan Bennett, David Lynch, and John Waters, but look at that cast! Future Oscar-winner Olivia Colman; comedy mainstay Julian Barrett; Georgina Campbell, who went on to star in Black Mirror, Krypton, and was a rumoured future Doctor Who; Daniel Rigby, who's cornering the market in playing shouty, self-delusional English man-children in comedies, and Di Martino herself.

Martino gives an amazing performance in a show full of amazing performances. In series 2, she moves on from a sullen evil twin of Bush to dying her hair blonde (and has stayed blonde in real life ever since) and entered an increasingly manic phase as she designs an ambitious and insanely elaborate music and performance piece that spirals into full-blown mental illness. Series 2 is darker and more sombre than Series 1 and it belongs to Martino as you watch Amy's doomed descent into psychosis. The show is a deeply empathetic and compassionate comedy about mental illness and the need to heal. And if you want to know why Di Martino was cast for Loki, watch Flowers.

Flowers Series 1 and 2 are now streaming on Netflix.

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