Comedy ‘Spreadsheet’ is an Excel-lent show

Although most people use them to create budgets, produce charts and storing data in the workplace, others have let Excel creep into their everyday lives.

One of those is Lauren (Katherine Parkinson), the freshly divorced, a mother-of-two at the centre of this new Australian comedy. With a successful career as a lawyer, two wilfully disobedient children and an inept ex-husband, Lauren is looking for sex without commitment.

With the help of her best friend and long-suffering assistant Alex (Rowan Witt), she creates the ‘Spreadsheet’ – a database of male options, customised to ensure a steady flow of sex amid the chaos of her life.

In the first episode, Condoms & Cornichons, an outdoor car park rendezvous with a finance manager is followed by an evening with an ex-rugby player. Afterwards, Lauren records their efforts on Excel. While some of her colleagues are amazed at Lauren’s stamina, what she hasn’t quite mastered is juggling her busy social and work life with the daily grind of motherhood.

Sure, she can handle her ex-husband Jake’s (Robbie Magasiva) ongoing incompetence and her daughter’s need for reassurance, but attempting to sext while doing the school pick-up ends with a three-month drivers’ licence suspension and her car impounded.

Likewise, a parental nightmare unfolds when her youngest decides a discarded “balloon” from the car floor is the perfect item for the latest round of show-and-tell.

Then, in Whose D*ck Is This?, Lauren receives an anonymous pic with a suspicious side jar. Determined to avoid this particular penis, she goes on a mission with Alex to entice the anonymous over-sharer out of the shadows. However, their sleuthing backfires and she inadvertently posts a photo of her vagina online.

Meanwhile, Lauren wonders why her kids have suspiciously good plaits, and realises Jake is still getting all of her photos on his photo stream.

British actor Parkinson, best known for her Bafta-winning role as Jen Barber in The IT Crowd and the films The Boat That Rocked and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has more recently been known for more serious, and occasionally gentler, fare.

But here, she’s given full rein to display her comedic timing and physical humour.

She says about the show: “Tonally, it’s quite a broad comedy, but you see Lauren with her children and then you see her in flagrante with somebody she’s met on an app. It’s quite jarring – but in an important and honest way. Because this is the way some women now, with more agency, are operating, and it doesn’t mean they’re not good mothers. Lauren is at the centre of lots of different worlds – her work life, her family life, her sex life. I thought it had a lot of potential.”

Like most sex comedies of this ilk, Spreadsheet is bound to draw comparisons to Sex and the City, but it is more of a cross between Starstruck and Motherland.

If you like the sound of that, add it to your viewing schedule. In fact, you could always create some sort of sheet or list, should you be that way inclined…