The Guardian has given Daddy Issues a 5 star review, calling the second series "a real beauty".
Sarah Dempster writes:
Daddy Issues series two review – Aimee Lou Wood and David Morrissey parenting comedy is a real beauty
Danielle Ward’s father-daughter sitcom has found its feet and is stuffed with sublime one-liners, acerbic wit, daftness, love and joy
‘How’s yer downstairs?” bellows West End Curls manager Rita (Sarah Hadland) at the scrunched-up ball of postnatal exhaustion that is Gemma (Aimee Lou Wood). “I had a C-section, Rita,” sighs Gemma from the depths of her (deeply) distressed leather jacket. “Remember?”
“Oh,” replies her boss, crestfallen. “The upstairs, then?” The upstairs, alas, is stuffed. Gemma’s norks are “in agony”, her lactation-based woes exacerbated by sleep deprivation and the fact that her insufferable berk of a mother is currently stuffing the spare room with statement cushions and endless unasked-for reflections on her butcher boyfriend’s cleaver. “It’s been three months now,” says Gemma, fixing Rita with a thousand-nappy stare. “It’s hell.”
There is much of this sort of thing in Danielle Ward’s Daddy Issues, the second series of which arrives amid celestial parps of jubilation and the assurance that everything will be OK … ish. Eventually. (Hopefully). Currently, however, all is not tickety-boo in Stockport. To the joys of single motherhood Gemma must now add mum Davina (previously Susan Lynch but now played, with no little glee, by Jill Halfpenny), who has invited her current squeeze, “the sausage man”, back to her daughter’s flat. (“He turned up with a massive pack of chops, Gemma. I weren’t gonna say no.”)
Davina operates within a mushroom cloud of delusion. Every utterance is delivered with nose aloft and glitzy bosom directed ceiling-wards, in the manner of Jane McDonald sharing an anecdote about her tights with a Channel 5 camera crew. Davina’s contributions to the household include bitching about baby Sadie’s nappies and making passive-aggressive comments about Gemma’s weight. “My cousin was eight stone just one month after giving birth,” she informs Gemma, sweetly. “Mum,” replies Gemma with fathomless patience. “She was in a coma.”
Brilliantly acerbic though the first series of Daddy Issues was, you sensed it never felt entirely at ease with itself. It was too broad-brushed in some places and slack-trousered in others. At times it bore the baby giraffe gait of a new comedy struggling to find its knees, never mind its feet. But oh, the second series. Not only has it found its feet, it has Deep Heated its knees and – if we can toss another tortured idiom into the ball pit – hit the ground sprinting. Much of this is down to David Morrissey as Gemma’s dad Malcolm, a perpetually deflating travel-mattress of a man, forever panicking as another puncture springs up while he’s still struggling to apply sticking plasters to the previous seven. Having been booted out of Gemma’s flat at the end of the first series, Malcolm has returned to the dilapidated bedsit of his terminally divorced friend (and “emotional support dickhead”) Derek. And galvanised by his newfound responsibilities as a grandfather, he has made himself useful by installing a flap in the bedsit’s boarded-up front door. “It’s like a cat flap,” he explains. “But for fellas.”
Here, amid the incessant rat-tat-tat of sublime one-liners, is a comedy with enormous affection for its characters. For all their buffoonery, these are complex and believable souls. Not that its softer bits are ever mawkish, mind. Nor is there ever the sense that its trickier themes (fractured families, young motherhood) are being shoehorned in to Generate Debate® or to #make_u_think. Instead, it’s all folded in together: love, regret, fear, daftness, joy, boredom, urinary tract infections and any other number of everyday messes, because, well, that’s life innit. And so, when the ever-eager Malcolm brings Gemma toast in bed and promises to help out “for ever” with Sadie, we leave on a shot of Gemma’s childlike face flitting, as it so often does, between gratitude, guilt and the knowledge that there is no easy way out of the situation in which she is now wedged.
Similarly, when Derek (a character whose seething misogyny would have been dialled down in lesser comedies) threatens in episode two to embark on a redemption arc, any actual progress is swiftly extinguished with a damp tea-towel. In Daddy Issues the irredeemable remain irredeemable, their hopelessness allowing the marginally less hopeless to huddle closer together and reassure themselves of their moral superiority. Before calling the guilty party a dickhead, obviously.
“Might as well come back, then,” says Gemma to Malcolm, ushering him, and us, into a future lined with love, doubt and cat flaps for fellas. Join her? Really, you’d be a dickhead not to.
Read the full review here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/24/daddy-issues-series-two-review-aimee-lou-wood-david-morrissey
Daddy Issues series two aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
