Review of Channel 4's new sadcom

On a joy-filled night out to celebrate the end of uni life, Ben and Lil are so giddily in love that one of their pals comments that their flirtatious behaviour ‘is like the last bit of Friends’.

Break Clause is, however, very much the antidote to Friends. Shot in 50 depressingly muted shades of brown, this show’s heart is in the grim realities of moving to the big city in 2026. The couple think themselves lucky to land not to an impossibly lavish apartment, but to a basic rodent-infested flat in an uninviting  South London estate.

But they’re young, in love and about to start on life’s adventure together, so this isn’t a bad toehold… until it’s revealed Ben was unfaithful and they split up. But the property market and landlords being what they are, means they cannot get out of the tenancy.

So are set up all the classic elements of a farce: two people trying to live separate, incompatible lives under the same roof. And if the rules of sitcom require characters to be trapped together, job done. On top of which we’ve the emotional complexity of the couple’s shattered relationship.

Before all this it seemed as if Lil (Laura Ricote) and Ben (Samuel Bottomley) were made for each other, as much as that can mean at 22. But there are many underlying tensions their break-up exposes – not least the financial gap between Lil, earning some money as a junior architect, and Ben, reduced to medical trials and ill-informed skip diving to make ends meet. She may be poor but he’s proper broke.

Ben is keen to try to undo the damage his recklessness has caused to the relationship, hoping to ‘use the pain to build something new’. He’s somewhere between endearingly dim and an utter idiot who deserves all that comes to him.

Meanwhile Ricote’s trademark adorable ditziness is given extra layers of awkwardness, cracking bad jokes at work and gyrating with agonising self-consciousness for the earnest boy she brought home for a revenge date.

The pacing’s a bit off in the first half of the first episode  – and it’s not quite clear why they need to hang around Leeds for a quarter of it before moving down south, save to introduce John Thomson as Ben’s boring, fretful but loving father.

But once they get to London, Alice Snedden’s direction gives the underlying farce the pace of a thriller as Ben tries to keep Lil from the truth. And after the scene-setting is done, writer Jess Bray properly hits her groove from episode two, with a strong balance between laughs and the inherent sadness of the premise. The situations feel genuine, authentic reflections of the realities of being at the bottom of the late-stage capitalism pyramid, trapped by circumstance. It’s Steptoe And Son but with TikTok.  

Thomson is also one of several great supporting characters, including Saturday Night Live’s Hammed Animashaun as a hapless estate agent, and the always engaging Charly Clive, from Britney and Rooster, as a neighbour with a bit of a thing for young Ben. ‘London is brutal at the start,’ she tells him. 

Whether it will get better, you’ll want to stick around to find out.

• Break Clause is on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight. All episodes are streaming now.

Review date: 1 Oct 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett