Dark comedy The Flowers to star Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt

Channel 4 is to air what they describe as  a ‘darkly comedic new six-part series’ The Flowers starring Peep Show’s Olivia Colman and The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt.

The Flowers is an imaginative, cinematic comedy about an eccentric family, the Flowers, struggling to hold themselves together. Barratt plays Maurice and Colman plays Deborah (a music teacher); a husband and wife who are barely together but yet to divorce. As Maurice fights inner demons and dark secrets, Deborah tries to keep the family together at all costs and becomes increasingly suspicious that Maurice is in a secret homosexual relationship with his Japanese illustrator Shun (played by Will Sharpe).

They live in a creaky, messy, crumbling old house with Maurice’s fruitcake mother Hattie (Leila Hoffman) and their maladjusted twenty five year old twins Amy (Sophia di Martino – Mount Pleasant, Friday Night Dinner) and Donald (Daniel Rigby – Eric and Ernie, Cardinal Burns, Undercover): both competing for the same girl and continually failing to burst through the confines of their absurdly arrested development.

Swinging from the magical to the mundane to the downright mad, the eccentric Flowers and their often self-inflicted crises, are surrounded by even stranger neighbours who become the agents of yet more everyday chaos and disaster.

“I feel very lucky to be making this show with Kudos and Channel 4. They have been unfailingly supportive and have pushed me to make bold decisions on a show that seeks both to celebrate and to challenge the traditional sitcom format. This is a comedy about people who are struggling and the situations that can arise when you refuse to admit that there are problems. Our aim is not to make light of the darkness, but to find the light within it.” – Writer Will Sharpe

The series is due to air in 2016