I've written reviews for each season of "Hullraisers" that you can find against the show's final episodes. Now the show is confirmed as not returning, I decided to post something here, to sum up my overall feelings about it.
Toni (Leah Brotherhead) is a mother and aspiring actress, living in Hull. Her older sister Paula (Sinead Matthews) is married to Dane (Yanick Ghanty) and has two children of her own, including Ashley (Natalie Davies) who is almost an adult herself. Rana (Taj Atwal) is Toni's best friend and Dane's sister and who is enjoying her single, childless, life. Toni struggles to cling to her youthful optimism, as it's drained away by parenthood.
I thought that the first season of "Hullraisers" was fine. It's not particularly hilarious, but neither is it a disastrous debacle. I really liked the performances though from our three leads. Leah Brotherhead came to my attention in "Zomboat" a few years back, this is a somewhat more realistic role though and, to my mind, she acquits herself to it well. All three roles could, in another version of the show, been reduced to their one defining characteristic, Toni is unfulfilled, Paula is a fishwife, and Rana is a maneater but there's enough shades to each performance to move beyond that.
The Hull setting doesn't get that much play and, having spent a bit of time there, the accents are a little more "generic Yorkshire/Lancashire" than specifically Humberside. I do like that its set in a more realistic working-class background and not extreme poverty though.
I would say that I thought the series improved in the second season, so much so that I would have looked forward to a third run.
