Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mayflies’ On Acorn TV, Where A Man With Cancer Asks An Old Friend To Help Him Die On His Own Terms

How do you explore end-of-life issues on a TV series or movie without getting too maudlin? One big way is to explore how it affects friendships, especially ones that have been established for decades. A new two-part limited series explores those issues as part of a friendship that has lasted for over 30 years.

MAYFLIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “They say you know nothing at eighteen,” says a graphic. “But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.”

The Gist: Jimmy (Martin Compston), a successful author living in London, gets a call from his old friend Tully (Tony Curran), telling him to come up to the seaside town in Scotland; he’s got some news. When Jimmy gets there, Tully drops the bomb: He has terminal cancer. To this point, he’s refused treatment, despite the fact that his longtime partner Anna (Ashley Jensen) wants him to get chemotherapy.

One of the big reasons why he wanted Jimmy to come see him in person was for a big ask: When the time comes, he wants Jimmy to accompany him to a clinic in Switzerland so he can die on his own terms.

The two have been friends since at least 1986, when the studious Jimmy (Rian Gordon) and the working class, musically-oriented Tully (Tom Glynn-Carney) bonded over their love of post-punk bands like New Order and Martin Scorsese mob films. The group they ran with were tight, and the summer of ’86 was a crucial one for all of them. Jimmy was encouraged by a teacher to go to university and make his way out of his dead-end hometown, and Tully’s rocky relationship with his father Woodbine (Stephen McCole) was going to be tested when Woodbine’s health starts declining.

As Tully and Jimmy discuss what Tully wants to do with the time he has left, Jimmy convinces his friend that he and Anna should finally tie the knot. Jimmy also tries to put the idea of chemo back on the table, along with telling Anna about Switzerland, something that Tully steadfastly refuses to do. His logic is that, if Anna knew he wanted to kill himself, she’d do everything to try to stop it.

Jimmy is torn, especially after talking to Tully’s sister Fiona (Shauna Macdonald), who tried to get him to agree to hospice, but knows that this is what Tully wants. Jimmy’s wife Iona (Tracy Ifeachor), on the other hand, is concerned that the longer he and Tully keeps this from Anna, the worse it’ll be when she finally finds out, and that keeping it from her is absolutely not fair to her, given that she’s the most important person in Tully’s life.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The plot of Mayflies, directed by Peter Mackie Burns and adapted by Andrea Gibb based on Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel, is almost the same as the 2019 film Paddleton. Only there, the friendship was between neighbors, not people who were friends for over 30 years.

Our Take: Mayflies is essentially a two-hour movie split into two episodes, and the structure of the story makes that evident, as we go back and forth from Jimmy and Tully’s youth in 1986 and the present day. The miniseries is full of riveting performances, with moving commentary on both the nature of longtime friendships but the idea that when a person is dying, the people who aren’t dying seem to think they know what’s better for that person.

What we wondered is exactly what the ’80s portion of the film was there to illustrate. Yes, it established the relationship between Tully and Jimmy and showed how the group you ran with when you’re 18 can drift apart as the years go on. And yes, it also establishes just why Tully was so adamant that he die on his own terms, given the desperation he saw in his father’s eyes as his health started going downhill.

But Curran and Compston are so good at establishing the warmth that exists between Jimmy and Tully that we really wanted to see more of the present-day story every time the scene switched back to the ’80s. We suspect that the novel’s ’80s story showed their friendship in more depth, but in the series it felt a bit superficial; we know Tully helped Jimmy pass his tests so he could go to university, and that their bond solidified when the group celebrated Jimmy’s accomplishments by going to a music festival in Manchester. But if you lifted the ’80s story out of the series, it wouldn’t have been missed much.

In fact, the series takes an even more emotional turn in the second episode, as Tully agrees to treatment but his health gets worse, and Anna finds out about Switzerland. This is where Jensen shines, as Anna is devoted to this complicated man but hates the fact that he made this decision behind his back, and hates it even more that Jimmy went along with it. Knowing a little bit about Jensen’s personal history, this must have been a difficult role for her to navigate, but it also means that her performance has a knowing quality that you see only in someone who has gone through something similar in their own lives.

Because of all of what was established during the show’s first 100 minutes, the last 20 become very strange but affecting at the same time. You try to put yourself in the shoes of both Tully and the people who are with him at the end, and try to understand where everyone is coming from, and the strangeness and emotional depth of those moments are handled in a way that evokes those emotions in a much more delicate manner than we’ve seen handled elsewhere.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Jimmy writes “SWITZERLAND” on his arm as a way of committing to Tully that he’s on board. They embrace, then we see the younger versions of the two men walking on the beach.

Sleeper Star: We mentioned Jensen above, and her performance here really resonated with us, because she’s in that position playing a loved one who is fighting for more time with her husband while reluctantly acknowledging that the way he wants to die is purely his decision.

Most Pilot-y Line: We have to give this to Compston; he manages to make us believe he’s in his mid-fifties when in reality he’s only 39, 15 years younger than Curran.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mayflies is an affecting story of a friendship tested by end-of-life issues, with some fantastic performances from Compston, Curran and Jensen.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.