Helen Serafinowicz writes comedy out of things that happened at the school gate, and with Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan and Holly Walsh she made that sourness funny. She is a writer for a room, which makes her hard to isolate and easy to enjoy.
Fi1m perspective
A mother at the school gate who has got something wrong, being told so kindly by other mothers who have not. That is the unit of Helen Serafinowicz's comedy: not the joke but the small public failure, and the people watching it. Motherland (2017) is built out of these and does not stop to console anyone. Serafinowicz has said the material came from notes she kept once she became a parent, and it shows. The humiliations are the ordinary kind, the ones we had hoped nobody was writing down.
She came to it late, after producing at Cartoon Network and running an interior-decor shop in Norwich, and the school gate seems to have been the thing that made a writer of her. Motherland was co-created with Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan and Holly Walsh, and ran to three series and specials. In between she made Nova Jones (2021) for CBBC, a musical comedy about a teenage pop star touring the galaxy, which ran three series and which we have not reviewed. Then came Amandaland (2025), the spin-off that follows Amanda after her divorce, and a stage musical, The Legend of Rooney's Ring, the same year.
What works is the refusal to be warm. Motherland is fast and sour about raising children while holding down a job, and it has no heart to speak of, which is why it is truthful. We laughed at it and felt, more than once, that we had been caught out; nothing in it is exaggerated far enough to let us off. Amandaland is the stronger programme, and the writing, shared with Barunka O'Shaughnessy, Laurence Rickard and Walsh, is at its best when it stays with Amanda's social climbing and her awkward dependence on Anne. The influencer jokes are easy to come by, but attaching them to that particular hunger for status gives them a reason to be there.
The weakness is the material that every parenting comedy has. The teenage-parenting scenes in Amandaland are familiar, and the programme goes ordinary whenever Lucy Punch is not in front of it. There is also the question of what belongs to Serafinowicz at all. These shows are written by story cards and paired drafts and line-by-line read-throughs, and we cannot tell you which cruelty is hers. We can tell you the shows she has written with others have a particular meanness about the middle-class mother, and the one she made alone was about a pop star in space.
The early worry about Motherland was that mothers would not want to watch it after a day of being mothers. Two programmes on, that has not proved a problem. What we would like to see is what else is in the notes.
Biography
Helen Serafinowicz is an English writer and television producer. She began her career as a producer at Cartoon Network before moving into writing.
She co-created and wrote the BBC comedy series Motherland (2016–2022), initially credited as Helen Linehan, which won a BAFTA for Best Scripted Comedy. She created the CBBC series Nova Jones and co-created the Motherland spin-off Amandaland (2025).
Serafinowicz was born in Liverpool and is the sister of actor Peter Serafinowicz. She was previously married to writer Graham Linehan.
