Mammals: a ‘clever’ comedy-drama starring a ‘shouty’ James Corden

This “pitch-black” comedy-drama was written by the much-celebrated playwright Jez Butterworth, and it’s not at all bad, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer.

James Corden stars as Jamie, a leading chef whose world falls apart when he learns that his wife Amandine (Melia Kreiling) is having an affair. As he tries to work out who her lover is, his unhappy and “dreamy” sister (Sally Hawkins) disappears ever further into a “Coco Chanel-themed fantasy” of her own imagining, to the dismay of her husband – “though like everything and everyone else in the series”, things may not be all they seem.

The show, on Amazon Prime, is twisty, “clever, witty and surprising”; but “Corden is miscast, chiefly because he lacks the range to enliven his character”.

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Mammals is certainly clever and surprising, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times – yet I never quite fell for it. Amandine is “a little too much the sort of female character I thought men weren’t supposed to write any more”; and I found the Chanel subplot “flatly bizarre”. Still, there are some funny moments, including one that made me hoot out loud with laughter.

The show purports to be about fidelity – “how we define it, why we place so much importance on it and what happens when a party fails in it” – but having half-heartedly raised these issues, the series scarcely interrogates them, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Still, “the basic story holds the interest well enough”, and Corden, though a bit “shouty”, proves he is “a better actor than is often remembered”.