Spoiler alert: this blog contains plot details for You, Me and the Apocalypse episode eight, shown on Sky1 Wednesday 18 November

When You, Me and the Apocalypse first started on Sky1 it seemed to be a light-hearted comedy drama in the vein of The Wrong Mans. The two shows even shared a leading man, Mathew Baynton. His mild-mannered bank clerk, Jamie, is a likable everyman with a complicated personal life trying to keep it together in the days before an asteroid hits Earth and wipes out humanity.



Each episode begins with a shell-shocked Jamie opining from a bunker in Slough a few seconds before asteroid hits. “Are we the future?” he asks in disbelief at one point, looking round at some of his companions: a shell-shocked nun, a traumatised scientist and his best friend Dave, who is now minus an eye.

It seems unlikely, but with this increasingly addictive show, anything is possible. From the very beginning, it has been clear that the writer, Iain Hollands, has more than one man’s journey in mind. The show juggles multiple storylines in a number of different countries, with half the pleasure coming from wondering just how this disparate gang is going to hook up.

In addition to Jamie, his mum, Paula (Pauline Quirke), and his best mate, Dave (Joel Fry), there’s Rob Lowe’s rebel Vatican priest, charged with identifying any possible second coming alongside naive nun Sister Celine (Gaia Scodellaro); Jenna Fischer’s wrongfully convicted librarian desperate to reunite with her family; her brother, Scotty (Kyle Soller), the scientific genius who may just save the world; and his boyfriend, General Arnold Gaines (Paterson Joseph), the man with the contingency plan if Scotty’s calculations don’t come off.

There’s also Ariel, the nearest thing this inventive series has to a pantomime villain. Ariel (also played by Baynton) is Jamie’s identical twin, raised in a commune by their birth mother and filled with hatred for his brother, who he feels has had the better lot in life. Driven by loathing of Jamie and love for his estranged wife, Hawkwind (to whom Jamie was also married. He knew her as Layla. It’s complicated), Ariel is the malignant force behind many of the show’s twists, as he scrabbles to destroy his twin, win back the woman he loves and survive the end of the world.

Entertaining though this is, the real power of You, Me and the Apocalypse comes from elsewhere. This is a deeply humane show and for every lovely sight gag, such as the deeply incongruous moment when Lowe and Quirke drive through the streets of Slough in a beaten-up VW Polo, there is a heartfelt scene, such as Rhonda’s reunion with her dying husband, that’s played entirely straight.

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As the end of the world draws ever nearer, so the tone has continued to darken, culminating in tonight’s episode, which saw the failure of Operation Saviour, the attempt to knock the comet off course, leading Gaines to put his brutal contingency plan in place. As the US president lied to people across the world, telling them they had been saved, Gaines’s soldiers rounded up the scientists who knew the truth, and marched them off to be shot. It was both thoroughly believable and horribly bleak, ramming home that for all its one-liners and throwaway jokes, this show is more drama than comedy.

It’s also a surprisingly serious examination of the nature of faith. Lowe’s priest is a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking rebel much given to making church-related puns (“Cloister-phobic” – Oh, Father Jude, it’s the way you tell them), but he’s truly a man of God. He believes in his faith and he believes in his church and his quest with Sister Celine forms one of the beating hearts of the show. Yes, there’s an attraction, and yes, it’s clear that sooner rather than later that attraction will be acted on, but what makes it interesting is that Hollands doesn’t shy away from the reality of what this means. We are always aware that because Jude’s faith is real, so will his sacrifice be, that any decision to leave the church will not be without consequence. When I interviewed Lowe before this series started, he remarked: “Father Jude’s fate isn’t funny.” He was right.

It also threw a further twist into an already complicated plot. Can Celine uncover the truth about Jude? Will Jamie get a moment’s happiness with Layla and their daughter, Frankie? Does Scotty know that Gaines ordered his fellow scientists to be shot? Can Rhonda escape the death penalty? What about Diana Riggs’ mysterious Sutton, who owns the bunker in Slough? How do they all get there and will the truth about her relationship to Scotty and Rhonda, Jamie and Ariel then be revealed?

In lesser hands, I would be worried that there is no way all this can be resolved in two episodes, but Hollands has repeatedly proved himself a smart, sharp juggler of storylines. Perhaps more importantly, this is a show built as much on strong characterisation as plot. Thus Megan Mullally’s redneck prisoner, Leanne, initially portrayed as a one-note joke, was later revealed to be an essentially kind woman hamstrung by poverty. There was a similar tenderness to Nick Offerman’s cameo as secret cross-dresser Buddy. It would have been easy to play his story broadly, but instead Hollands and Offerman made you believe every word, ensuring that it was Buddy’s humanity, his desire to belong, that lingered long in the mind.

That is ultimately what this clever, ambitious show is really about. Strip away the end-of-the-world trappings, the sight gags and smart plotting, and you’re left with a story about loneliness. Everybody on this show has a desperate desire to connect to someone, a desire that’s only exacerbated by the extreme situation they find themselves in. Each week, they reach out and try and forge those connections. It’s that concern for and love of humanity that makes You, Me and the Apocalypse such a wonderful show.

You, Me and the Apocalypse is on Sky1 on Wednesdays at 9pm