If I were to put together an enormous focus group of Gen Xers and boomers, get them riled up with unlimited orange squash and party rings, and force them to collaborate on a word cloud to describe their millennial counterparts, I strongly suspect that the big, bold descriptor in the centre of that constellation of insults would read: “ENTITLED”. It will take about 10 minutes of Everything I Know About Love, the new BBC adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s bestselling memoir, to appreciate that millennials are not exactly helping themselves in this department.
The show begins in 2012, in an almost extravagantly spacious and well-decorated house in Camden (brought to you by the Friends school of inexplicable metropolitan living standards). Four pals are beginning their post-university lives. At the heart of both the domestic set-up and the show itself is Maggie (Emma Appleton, who’s also currently starring in Pistol), a fictionalised proxy for author – and the show’s creator – Alderton. Maggie is a booze-fuelled dreamer, only kept from floating away by the anchor of her best friend and flatmate, the oppressively grounded Birdy (Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Bel Powley). When Maggie makes the mistake of setting Birdy up with muscled dolt Nathan (Ryan Bown), she is forced to watch as the sole meaningful relationship in her life is stretched to breaking point. “In every love story there are unavoidable junctions of change,” Maggie observes, as her simple co-dependent lifestyle gets turned upside down.
