What a time to be recommending a comedy called Feel Good. But I am. Wholeheartedly and without reservation. It’s a glorious, shining jewel in the middle of what I think we can safely call the greatest global shitstorm since the second world war (Brexit almost begins to look like village pensioners riven with dissent over the prize for best onions at the summer show.). Canadian standup Mae Martin’s six-part semi-autobiographical series for Channel 4 (she writes and stars) centres around the relationship between Mae the character and her new girlfriend, George (Charlotte Ritchie). It captures the early days of a romance beautifully, when lust obscures detail and difference, and everything is precisely as thrilling as it is anxiety-making. “She’s like a dangerous Mary Poppins,” Mae says admiringly of her quintessentially English beloved. “And I’m Bart Simpson.” Advertisement The idiotic banter between fledgling partners is refined, via Martin’s immaculate writing and delivery so clean and fleet that you can actually feel it doing you good, to a hilarious point. “I didn’t know you have a mug with ‘I Heart Guernsey’ on it,” says Mae during the couple’s first trip to Ikea. “Is it true? DO you heart Guernsey? What even is a Guernsey? It’s making me question everything.” By the end of the first episode, Feel Good has shifted focus slightly, to concentrate on what happens when reality begins to reassert itself. Their particular reality includes George not having dated a woman before and being reluctant to come out or introduce Mae to her friends and family, and Mae being a recovering addict who retains all the impulses that lead her into dangerous situations, encourage bad choices and strain relationships. “I knew she was an addict,” says George’s depressed flatmate, Phil. “Her legs were always moving and her eyes are spooky.” Martin looks like an angel adulterated with duckling, but Phil is right in a larger sense – the restless energy beneath means you daren’t take your eyes off her for a second. Feel Good moves so quickly and lightly that it seems impossible it could also be managing to construct characters and burrow into psyches as deeply and empathically as it does. While also, I must emphasise, remaining as funny as any comedy dedicated to that end. Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s appalling mother is emblematic of all Feel Good’s strengths, periodically popping up on Skype (“Don’t look at me! I’m 3,000 years old!”) to deliver – inadvertently, if you’re generously inclined – the latest quota of maternal blows to her child’s psyche. She blames Mae’s addiction issues on the fact that she was four weeks premature. “You were in an incubator. It’s why we’re not close.” “We’re not close?” replies Mae, duckling suddenly to the fore, innocence bruised, and viewers cackling. As the series goes on, it takes in not just the peaks and troughs of romantic relationships, as George and Mae unpack their considerable baggage, but also the impact of toxic family influence (George’s mother, embittered by but still in emotional thrall to her ex-husband, casts her own pall and is played with the magnificence you would expect by Pippa Haywood) and probes the nature of various forms of friendship. Mae is a passionate attachment seeker, whose pulsing need rather than rational decision-making habitually leads her into disaster. Her chosen sponsor, Maggie (Sophie Thompson, in a part that makes glorious use of her effortless eccentricity), is fun but not nearly aware enough of her own issues to be of help to anyone, let alone another, younger addict. Maggie’s backstory, as it emerges, adds another perspective on the mother-daughter relationship and poses more questions about how we love, negotiate with and protect ourselves from each other Sign up to hear about our weekend newspapers Read more George, by contrast, has a vast array of friends. Or at least, as she comes gradually to realise, a lot of people with whom she spends a lot of time. Whether they mean anything to her, or she to them, is another point of scrutiny for the show. What is any friend worth if you don’t feel you can introduce your loved one to them? Feel Good should make you feel good. It’s not only an immaculately written and paced piece of work and a properly funny comedy, it is also has created a delicately and intricately constructed, deeply humane world where people make mistakes but are not damned, and have flaws that are not fatal, and – despite all the obstacles – connect across and despite their divides. It is good for almost everything that ails us.