Feel Good, and the One Person Who Hears It Last

The first time George says it in front of her friends, she is lying in a hospital bed on morphine. At a party she has been lifted up by a group of men and dropped onto a glass table, and she is badly hurt. Her friends are round the bed. Mae has come running. And with the drug in her, the thing George has not been able to say sober comes out easily: that she and Mae are together. Later, while she sleeps, Mae slips the painkillers left in the room into a pocket.

Stay in that room for a moment, because the whole series is in it. Two people who love each other, and two drugs. One of them can say the true thing out loud only once a drug has loosened it. The other puts the same kind of drug away for later, and tells no one.

The series is called Feel Good, which is the promise all of its substances make: the cocaine in Mae’s past, the pills in Mae’s pocket, the laugh at the end of a joke, the first rush of a love that has two people living together within three months. The title is not quite ironic. Feeling good is real, and the series is funny, often very funny, about how badly everybody in it wants to. But it is named after the thing it learns to distrust, and by the end it has found something it trusts more.

This essay is about the route the truth takes. In Feel Good the hard things keep arriving the wrong way round. George learns who Mae has been from Mae’s parents, on the phone. George’s friends learn about Mae from George on morphine. George learns Mae’s deepest fear from a seat in the audience of a comedy club. Nearly everyone in this story can say the true thing to someone: a stranger, a meeting, a microphone, a room. What Mae and George cannot do, for most of two series, is say it first to the one person it concerns, and so that person is, again and again, the last to hear. Their love goes wrong in exactly the places where it is used instead of saying it: as a high, as a hiding place, as a game with a script. It steadies only when the order is reversed.

What the series finds is not that love has to be less intense. It is that love cannot also be the place where both people hide.

Feel Good is a British comedy-drama of twelve short episodes, split across two series, created and written by Mae Martin and Joe Hampson. The first series was made for Channel 4, which broadcast its opening episode on 18 March 2020; Netflix released it around the world the next day. Channel 4 did not take up a second series, and Netflix made the second and final one on its own, releasing it on 4 June 2021. Ally Pankiw directed the first series and Luke Snellin the second. Martin plays Mae, a Canadian stand-up comedian working in Manchester. Charlotte Ritchie plays George, an English teacher at a secondary school. Lisa Kudrow and Adrian Lukis are Mae’s parents, Linda and Malcolm, and Sophie Thompson is Maggie, an older member of Narcotics Anonymous. In 2021 the Royal Television Society gave Martin its Breakthrough Award, and gave Martin and Hampson its prize for comedy writing, which the judges called engaging, warm and truthful.

It is semi-autobiographical, and that asks for care. Martin plays a fictional version of themself, and before the first series came out described the character as their own worries and hang-ups turned up far past life size: roughly where Martin had been about ten years earlier. Martin was just as clear about where the two part company, and made a point, laughing, of having a great relationship with their own parents. So this essay reads the fiction. It says nothing about Mae Martin’s life beyond what Martin has said in public.

Martin is non-binary, has said so publicly, and has added that they love it when people say they. Inside the series, Mae is called she at first, grows less and less sure, and in the last episode is offered a word without anything being settled. This essay mostly uses the name, and they where a pronoun cannot be avoided. It reads Mae’s questions about gender the way the series presents them, as questions still being asked, and it does not answer them on Mae’s behalf.

One more thing before the story. This essay discusses both series, including how the second one ends, and it will say so again just before it gets there. It also discusses the abuse in Mae’s past that the second series reveals. That is stated once, plainly, and not described.

Mae is on stage at the Gag Bin, a comedy club in Manchester, and the set is getting a lukewarm reception. One person in the audience is enjoying it. That is George. They stay on after the show, they kiss, they go back to her flat, and George, who has only ever dated men, is living with Mae within three months.

It is only then, on the phone to Mae’s parents, that George learns what Mae has not told her: that Mae was once addicted to cocaine, dealt drugs and went to prison. Mae’s reasons deserve to be heard first. A new love can feel like a new page, and the old pages are the last ones anybody wants to hand over. Martin, before the first series came out, said they could relate to the way the character is “really trying very hard to push forward and resisting processing all of that.”

George pushes Mae back to Narcotics Anonymous, the fellowship in which people recovering from drug use meet to talk, and in which a more experienced member can act as a sponsor, a guide through its twelve steps. Mae walks out of the first meeting. An older member, Maggie, follows Mae out and, over coffee, appoints herself Mae’s sponsor without being asked. Early on, Mae waves the meetings away with a line that comes to this: there was a problem, and now there is George.

Then the hiding begins, and it runs in both directions. Mae has hidden a past. George hides a present. On a night out she tells her friends that the person she is seeing is a man, and before long the invented boyfriend has a name. When her cousin gets married, she tells Mae that her invitation does not include a guest, and goes alone. Mae, left for a day and a half, floods George’s phone with messages until she asks for them to stop. And at the wedding, George tells the photographer, a stranger, that she is seeing a woman.

It is easy to be hard on George. The series knows how easy, so it is worth doing the harder thing first, which is to understand her.

This is her first relationship with someone who is not a man. She comes from a buttoned-up middle-class family, and she lives among friends who have only ever known one version of her. Charlotte Ritchie, who plays her, has described George as someone used to being mainstream. For a person like that, coming out is not a single announcement. It is the revision of a whole life story in front of everyone who helped to write it, and it has to be done before she knows what to call what is happening to her.

That last part matters more than it looks. This Library has argued, in “Carol and the Look That Arrives Before Permission”, that a person can be recognised by someone else before there is a name for what is being recognised, and that the hard question is not what this is but whether you will pretend you did not notice. George has noticed. She has not got the name. Hiding is partly a way of not being made to announce a self she has not yet met.

The truth does get out of her. It just gets out where it costs least. She tells a wedding photographer, a stranger. She tells her friends on morphine, and wakes up the next morning to their messages about Mae and about her sexuality. A truth told on a drug still counts in the morning, and the series lets her find that out.

None of which makes the hiding free. Someone pays for it, and mostly not George. In “A Secret Changes the Terms. Privacy Was Never in Them.”, this Library drew a line between a secret and privacy: a secret is a withheld change to something the other person is standing on, and privacy is everything they were never standing on. By that test, George’s sexuality is her own, and when she speaks about it is hers to decide. But Feel Good finds the hardest case for the line. When the private matter is a relationship, the other person is standing inside it. Mae cannot meet George’s friends, cannot be introduced, cannot go to the wedding, and hears George’s life described with a man in it. George’s privacy and Mae’s existence occupy the same room. Neither of them is wrong about what they need, and that is why it hurts.

Mae’s side of the damage is the one the series names out loud. Back at a meeting after the wedding weekend, Mae tells the room that the relationship itself has become the addiction. It is Mae’s word, said in the room built for that word, and this essay will not improve on it with a clinical term of its own. Everything about how Mae loves is fast: the first night, the moving in, the messages when George is away. The relationship has taken the place a drug once held.

The most unguarded moment of the first series comes in Blackpool, the seaside resort in the north-west of England where Mae’s parents, over from Canada, have come to scatter their cat’s ashes. Mae has been encouraged to make amends, and apologises to them formally. Linda changes the subject. Then she blames Mae for the choices Mae made, and tells George that Mae only ever goes for straight women. Afterwards George asks whether she will be the next one Mae loses interest in. Mae’s answer is that George makes Mae feel, at last, at rest.

This Library has argued, in “When Safety and Attraction Point to Different People”, that some people have never felt safe and wanted by the same person at the same time, and have stopped expecting the two to coincide. In Blackpool, Mae is describing the rare case where they do. What the series goes on to show is that this is not the end of the difficulty but a new form of it. Someone who has learned to recognise love by its intensity may not know what to do with rest.

So the rest does not hold. After George says that if they ever split up she would probably go back to men, the painkillers come out of the pocket. The next time they are in bed, Mae cannot stop thinking about Mae’s own body, about gender, about what George really wants. Martin, asked about all the sex in the first series, said it is almost the only thing the two have in common, and asked what is left of a love once the “all-consuming agony and ecstasy” goes.

It is the right question, and the first series does not yet have an answer. For now, feeling good may be the only proof of love Mae knows how to read.

Stand-up comedy is one person alone with a microphone, turning their own life into material in front of strangers, and in the first series a once-famous comedian making his comeback gives Mae the form’s oldest piece of advice: the truth is what gets the laughs. So Mae goes on stage, with George in the audience, and says the truest things anyone says in that series. That Mae might be transgender. That Mae has been trying to be the boyfriend George dreamed of in high school. That Mae is afraid George will one day look and see a girl.

It is brave. It is also, precisely, a way round her. George hears the deepest fear of the person she lives with as one face among many in a room that has come to laugh. She leaves. Martin, asked what connects the meetings and the stage, drew the line the series draws: there is far more honesty in the meetings, because the stage is always a curated version of yourself, and “speaking on stage and getting laughs about heavy topics is not the same thing as sorting those issues out.”

British comedy knows the device. In Fleabag, the heroine turns aside to the camera while other people are talking and tells us what she really thinks, and in time a man in the room notices her doing it. Feel Good’s version is less comfortable, because its audience is a real one and the person the confession concerns is sitting in it, reduced for the length of a set to one more stranger in a seat.

Afterwards George, who has found the pills, asks Mae one question: do they make Mae happy? Not really, Mae says. They split up. Mae relapses, sleeps with Maggie’s daughter, loses the one person in the meetings who had claimed Mae, and books a flight home to Canada. And George, just then, reaches the place she could not reach before. She apologises, and she introduces Mae to her mother. By then the flight is booked. In this series the truth is rarely wrong. It is usually late.

The second series opens in the Canadian rehab that Mae last saw at eighteen. A worker there advises Mae to step back from George and concentrate on getting well, and Mae rings George to say they should stop living together. Asked about the teenage years, Mae finds that large parts of them are missing. Mae leaves rehab with an old comedian friend called Scott, someone Mae once shared a house with. The series lets that pass without comment. It will come back.

Back in England, George is seeing a colleague, Elliott, and she has found out something about herself. She wants rougher sex than he is comfortable with, and when she asks for it he balks. She has asked for what she wants, which is the thing people are so often too afraid to do, and the series does not punish her for it. She goes back to Mae. Within weeks they are re-enacting their first night, starting at the Gag Bin, and then trying one role after another.

Nothing in that is a problem in itself, and this essay will not treat it as one. Two adults agreeing to play is ordinary, and for many couples it is one of the ways they come closer. What the series asks is what the play is doing, here, for these two, and it answers from inside the story. At a hospital one night, Mae tries to start one of the games and George walks out of it. Soon after, she suggests a few weeks without sex, and Mae comes to think that the games appealed because they were a way out of Mae’s own body. A role gave Mae somewhere to be that was not Mae.

This is where consent turns out to be more than a yes at the start. The games were agreed between two adults. But a yes is not a contract for the whole of what follows, and it does not stay true by itself; it depends on both people still being there. When one of them has gone somewhere else inside the game, the other noticing, and stopping, is not a failure of the play. It is the part of consent that looks like care. George’s suggestion that they stop for a while may be the most loving thing either of them does in that stretch of the series.

At the same hospital, Mae is found breathing from an oxygen mask, and a clinician says Mae is showing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That is the series’ word, given to a character by a character, after the panic attacks and the gaps in memory. This essay reports it and adds no word of its own.

Then Mae tells George where it comes from. As a teenager, Mae was sexually abused by much older people, and it happened in secret. One of them was Scott, the old friend Mae had left rehab with. He was thirty. Mae was fifteen. A fifteen-year-old cannot consent to an adult. There is nothing here to weigh, and this essay will not describe it further.

Seen from here, the first series looks different, and what follows is this essay’s reading, not something the series says. For most of the first series, Mae could not bear being kept secret, and from outside it looked like impatience, or pride, or need. But secrecy was the condition in which Mae had been harmed. That harm depended on nobody knowing. George, hiding Mae for reasons of her own that had nothing to do with any of it, could not have known what her hiding touched, and it seems Mae could not have said. Being hidden by someone who loves you is not the same act as being kept secret by someone who is harming you, and nothing here suggests it is. It may simply land in the same place.

It would be easy to let this explain everything, and the series refuses. It does not turn the abuse into a key that opens every earlier scene. The relapse, the night with Maggie’s daughter, the flood of messages and the hidden pills are still Mae’s. In the second series Mae’s friends stage an intervention, and Mae sees, for once, how much of that life has been about Mae. Before the first series came out, Martin said they had been so worried about seeming to write a “Poor me!” story that they went out of their way to bring out the character’s flaws. The second series keeps that promise after revealing the worst thing.

This Library argued, in “Whole With a History”, that someone who has been hurt is usually handed one of two stories, that they are damaged and must be repaired, or that they are fine and should stop dwelling, and that both are false: they are whole, and they have a history. The history is part of the account without writing every sentence of it. Feel Good holds Mae to exactly that. What happened explains a great deal. It excuses nothing Mae does to anyone else, and it does not make Mae less than whole.

From here the essay discusses the last two episodes, and how the series ends.

George has a reckoning of her own in the second series. Her homophobic father, also called George, arrives unannounced, and they have it out. She has already given up a project of her own at school, a group of teachers she had started with Elliott, saying she needs to concentrate on Mae. And it is Elliott, who has reasons of his own for saying it, who tells her what is true anyway: that she is always holding Mae up, and never the other way round.

Then George stages a show at school, and Mae, on advice from Elliott that is not given kindly, proposes to her on stage in front of the audience. It is the grand gesture every romantic comedy has taught its viewers to wait for. George says no.

It is worth being exact about what the no refuses. Not Mae. The room. A question asked in front of an audience is not the same question asked in private, because the audience makes one answer cheap and the other very expensive. That is why a public proposal can work as pressure even when it is meant as love, and why George’s no may be the most honest thing she says in either series: a truth told in public, sober, on her own terms, at a price. In a genre that has long treated a woman’s yes as its climax, Feel Good gives its heroine a no and lets the love survive it.

The last episode takes them to Canada, to Mae’s parents’ house, where Linda’s distrust has become surveillance, down to testing for drugs. Mae and George slip away from it, and somewhere in the escape George suggests that Mae might think about a word: non-binary. It is offered, not assigned, and the series leaves it with Mae. The person who could not acknowledge Mae in front of her friends a series earlier is now offering Mae a way to be named, privately, to Mae alone, as a question.

The parents have a truth of their own, and it arrives, as truths do here, very late. Malcolm admits that it was he who broke the ornaments Linda had always blamed on Mae. It is a small thing and not small at all: years of Mae carrying the blame for something, lifted by one sentence from the person who knew all along.

Then Mae goes to see Scott. He talks as if having looked after Mae once had given him some claim, and he frets aloud about his reputation. Mae names what he did. Mae holds him. Then Mae tells him they never want to see him again. The embrace is not explained, and this essay will not explain it for Mae; it may be grief for the friend Scott was supposed to be, or for the teenager, or something that has no name. What the series lets Mae say last is the sentence that closes the door. Looking after someone gives you no claim on them, and it never did.

And then the dock. Mae and George sit side by side at the water’s edge, steadier than they have ever been, and inside the story nobody is watching them. There is no stage, no role, no proposal, nobody to perform the relationship for and nobody to hide it from. A critic writing as the second series came out noticed that even the camerawork feels steadier. The series is called Feel Good, and it does not end on feeling good. It ends on steadiness, which is quieter, harder to sell, and earned.

In Japan the series streams on Netflix with Japanese subtitles and a Japanese dub, and some of what it takes for granted may need a word. Narcotics Anonymous is not a British peculiarity. Its Japanese organisation describes it as a non-profit fellowship of people for whom drugs had become a serious problem, whose only requirement for membership is a desire to stop using, and its meetings run across the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, including meetings for women only, meetings for sexual minorities, and bilingual meetings in Japanese and English.

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare says in its public guidance that addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling can be recovered from with appropriate treatment and support, and names prejudice and discrimination among the reasons people and their families do not reach that help. Against that, the plainest thing Feel Good offers may be its ordinariness. Recovery here is a meeting Mae walks out of, a sponsor who oversteps, a relapse, a rehab Mae has been to before, and a return, all of it played as comedy and none of it played for contempt. Martin said, before the first series, that they hoped it would go some way towards humanising addiction.

On coming out, Japan’s workplace guidance already takes the side this essay has taken with George. The ministry’s guidance on power harassment gives, as one example of it, passing on to other workers, without the person’s consent, their sexual orientation or gender identity after they have confided it to a manager. Whether and when to say it belongs to the person. What Feel Good adds is the part a guideline cannot hold: when the private matter is a relationship, someone else lives inside it, and pays a share of what the silence costs.

Charlotte Ritchie has said that the messages she and Martin received came not only from viewers who felt their sexuality represented but from people who might be in secret relationships, or who feel shame. Two kinds of reader in Japan may find the series closer than it first looks. One is a woman who has moved here from abroad and is with someone whose family or office does not know about her; George’s hiding will need no translation, and nor will what it costs the person hidden. The other is anyone recovering far from home in a second language, for whom Mae’s first community in a new city, a room of strangers who meet to say true things, is less a comic premise than a description of how a life gets rebuilt. Some of those rooms here are held in two languages.

If drugs or alcohol have become a problem for you or someone close to you, the ministry’s pages point to your local public health centre, the mental health and welfare centre for your area, and self-help groups such as Narcotics Anonymous. If something like what happened to Mae happened to you, the national number #8891 connects to the nearest one-stop support centre for survivors of sexual violence, and from most phones the call is free.

Four objections, and the first two land.

The first is that this essay has been unfair to George at exactly the point where it promised not to be. Setting the secrecy of Mae’s abuse beside the secrecy of George’s hiding, however carefully, puts her in company she has done nothing to deserve. She was a frightened woman protecting a self she had not yet named; she harmed nobody on purpose, and she knew nothing. That is conceded. The claim was only that the two might land in the same place in Mae, and the series never says even that. A reader who thinks the rhyme should have been left unwritten is making a fair point.

The second is that telling the one person is too tidy a moral. For many people and many truths, a room of strangers is safer than the person, and the series knows it. Mae’s first honest sentences are said in a meeting and on a stage, and they are not worthless: the set George walked out of went viral and helped a career along, and the meetings are where Mae learns the words at all. Some truths should not be told to the one person yet, and nobody owes a partner a disclosure on the partner’s timetable. What survives is narrower. A room can be where you practise; the person who is standing on the truth should not be the last to hear it.

The third is that the ending is the genre speaking. Romantic comedies return their couples to each other, and a quiet dock is just where they like to leave them. A reader who thinks the more honest ending would have been two steadier people living apart has not misread anything. The series chose the dock, and this essay cannot prove it chose right.

The fourth concerns what kind of object this is. Feel Good draws on its maker’s life, and it is tempting to read it as testimony. It is a fiction, made by someone who has said publicly which parts were turned up and which were not, and reading Mae’s addiction, gender or abuse as a report on Mae Martin would be a trespass. This essay has tried not to commit it.

Where this Library stands. Feeling good and being well are different things, and a love that is only ever asked for the first will be made to do the work of a drug. Privacy and secrecy are different things, and when the private matter is a person, that person has a say. Being wanted and being acknowledged are different things, and the second is the one that happens in front of other people. And the order in which a truth travels matters. A room can be where you find the words. The person standing on the truth deserves to hear it from you, first, in person, before the room does.

And the part that runs against us. This house sells private companionship: bounded, scheduled, paid for. An evening nobody else needs to know about can be a rest. It can also be exactly what this series warns about: a room where no one has to be told anything, where a feeling arrives on time and leaves no trace in the rest of a life. We cannot tell from here which it is for anyone. And the one person this series means is not a stranger, not a paid one, and not us. A reader who notices that an essay about saying things to one person comes from a business that sells time with one person is entitled to weigh it accordingly.

Who is the one person standing on the thing you have not said, and who has heard it before them: a friend, a room, a screen, a glass of something? Is what you keep private yours alone, or does someone else live inside it? When something feels good, does it leave you steadier the next morning, or only wanting more? And if you are the one being kept quiet, have you said what it costs you?

If you are the one who hides, you are not a coward. You are protecting something real, and the timing is yours. If you are the one who is hidden, you are not asking too much by minding. Both can be true at once, and Feel Good spends two series finding that out. It ends with two people on a dock, with nothing to perform and nobody to perform it for. It does not promise they will be all right. It only shows them, at last, telling each other first.