Asher Keddie is back as a ball of nervous energy in the new season of Strife
Strife ★★★★
The first season of this loose adaptation of Mamamia founder Mia Freedman's memoir broke records as Binge's biggest original series premiere, and fans will be pleased to know season two picks up shortly after the events of the finale.
Evelyn (Asher Keddie), who is struggling to get traction for her new website for women, Eve Life, discovered her deputy Christine (Maria Angelico) had defected to a start-up at their old workplace – a website aimed at the same audience as Eve Life.
That competitor, Whoman (the pronunciation is as silly as you think), has launched, amping up Evelyn's already considerable anxiety. (If you're coming into Strife fresh, it's important to know the action is set around 2012, when websites such as these were something of a new frontier.)
Adding to that stress is the fact Eve Life isn't making as much money as it needs to (perhaps she shouldn't have rented the cinematically pleasing but over-the-top warehouse space their office is now in), not all of her employees are happy, and her home life is more complicated than ever.
Having given up her apartment to save money, she and her almost-ex-husband Jon (Matt Day) are trying out the 'birdnesting' idea, in which children stay in the family home and both parents take it in turns to stay there with them. Even when Evelyn has her weekly turn though, her son Alex (Darcy Tadich) spends more time with his precocious new girlfriend, and her daughter Addy (Willow Speers) isn't that keen on spending time with Evelyn either. Then there's the fact that Jon has started dating again, as has Evelyn's mum Ginny, a fabulously dry Tina Bursill, who gets a bigger role as Jon and Evelyn stay with her when the other is at home.
While much of the action takes place in the Eve Life office, where Evelyn spends most of her time second-guessing herself, frantically searching for an investor and dealing with an online troll calling out her middle-class privilege and hypocrisy, this season focuses more to her personal life and anxieties around parenting, divorce, and even friendship in middle age, which Evelyn explores with her new therapist Sylvie (Mary Coustas).
And all this before Evelyn's former employee Norma (Lucy Ansell) publishes her book Toxic Boss, a thinly veiled story about Norma's time working at Eve Life.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
Jon Hamm's Mad Men co-stars turned yellow due to show smoking
Jon Hamm's 'Mad Men' co-stars turned "yellow and sallow" after attempting to smoke real cigarettes on screen. The 54-year-old actor - who led the cast of the 1950s advertising drama for its entire run from 2007 to 2015 - went through dozens of fake smokes, made from rose petals and marshmallows, during filming but he fared better than some of his unnamed co-stars who were keen to make their experience more authentic. Speaking at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas, at the weekend, he said: 'I think somebody did a count, and in the pilot alone, I smoke 75 cigarettes. 'They are fake cigarettes, but that just means that there's no nicotine in them. It doesn't mean you're not burning something.' Of his castmates, he added: 'They were like, 'We're gonna smoke real cigarettes. We really want to, feel it and do it.' 'And I was like, 'Let me know how that goes.' And within three days, they were yellow and sallow. This is a terrible idea.' And because 'Mad Men' was set in New York but shot in Los Angeles, most of the filming took place indoors, making the smoky situation even trickier to deal with. Jon said: 'We didn't go outside, which was awesome and not awesome. The whole thing, the whole stage is full of fake cigarette smoke.' And to replicate a vodka martini, 'Mad Men' bosses added onions to water. Jon quipped: 'Oh, the breath was lovely." His co-star John Slattery, who played Roger Stirling, laughed: 'Pop another pearl onion in your glass of water, and then smoke 26 more fake cigarettes and it's 9:30 in the morning!' The two stars also recalled how the first day of shooting 'Mad Men' was interrupted by the discovery of a dead body in the parking lot. Jon said: 'Scene one, day one, there was a dead body in the parking lot, but that's a story for another day." John added: 'That's true. First day of work, a guy fell off a bridge, and he was in the parking lot, face down. I saw a foot.' In 2015, AMC, who broadcast 'Mad Men', released some statistics to mark the programme's finale, which included the revelations that the characters had smoked a staggering 942 cigarettes and poured 369 drinks between them across all seven seasons.
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
Jon Hamm feels lucky to be alive after 10 years of smoking on Mad Men
Jon Hamm feels lucky to be alive after smoking so many fake cigarettes on the set of 'Mad Men'. The 54-year-old actor played chain-smoking advertising executive Don Draper in the hit TV drama between 2007 and 2015 - and Jon admits he feels grateful not to have experienced any negative effects after spending almost a decade puffing away on prop smokes. During a panel discussion at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas, Jon explained: "When you're in gear and smoking cigarette and looking out the fake window, the fake hanging part of Midtown, it was believable ... "Obviously it's a tremendous honor, and it's a wonderful thing to have worked on and contribute to something that has lasted this long. "I'm glad I'm still alive, basically because of the amount of cigarettes I smoked." Jon also recalled a meeting with TV bosses before the show started filming in which they discussed whether the characters should be seen smoking onscreen. He said: "I remember at some point, having a conversation with the executives at AMC. They said: 'Do they have to smoke?' That was like: 'Are you f****** kidding me? Yes, they literally have to. They're addicted to cigarettes. It's kind of why they're sold. They're super popular!'" The fake cigarettes contained rose petals and marshmallow, but Jon was still wary of them. He told the panel: "It was not [good for us]. Yeah, I think somebody did a count, and in the pilot alone, I smoked 75 cigarettes … They are fake cigarettes, but that just means that there's no nicotine in them. It doesn't mean you're not burning something ... "We didn't go outside, which was awesome and not awesome. The whole thing, the whole stage is full of fake cigarette smoke." He also revealed some of the younger castmembers attempted to film their smoking scenes using real cigarettes and they ended up regretting it within days. Jon explained: "They were like: 'We're gonna smoke real cigarettes. We really want to, feel it and do it'. And I was like,: 'Let me know how that goes'. "And within three days, they were yellow and sallow. This is a terrible idea."
The Age
17-05-2025
- The Age
‘I told my mum I had met my husband': Emma Lung's second chance at love
This story is part of the May 18 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Actor Emma Lung has starred in films alongside some of the industry's biggest names, including Hugo Weaving and Brian Cox. The 43-year-old, who stars opposite Asher Keddie in streaming series Strife, also discusses how she and her now husband had a second chance at love. My grandfather, James, was born in Guangzhou [China]. He moved to Papua New Guinea after he finished high school. From there, he moved to Sydney, where he met my grandmother, Colleen. Together, they had seven children. I called my grandfather Y éye (Mandarin for paternal grandfather). I didn't know him for a lot of my early life, as our family lived in Tokyo, where my father, Gary, and mother, Heather, taught English. But when we returned to Sydney, I knew him as a gentle and wise man. I couldn't ask for a more loving father. He's been in my corner since day one and continues to be. There's really nothing he wouldn't do for me. Dad is gregarious, hilarious and impatient. He's also an absolute cinephile, and so I grew up watching Woody Allen and Rob Reiner and all the films of the 1970s. From him, I've inherited my sense of curiosity, adventure and tenacity – probably my loudmouth tendencies, too. My teenage celebrity crush was River Phoenix. I still can barely say his name without my heart missing a beat. My first serious relationship came when I was 13. I'd met Thorald at [Sydney's] Newtown School of Performing Arts. When I was 15, I managed to convince my parents to let me attend an acting school in New York for the last term of year 10, and so I moved there with Thorald and his mum. When I came back, I sent a video audition to the Professional Performing Arts School of Manhattan. I got accepted, and so I completed my final year of drama school in New York. When Thorald and I came back to Australia, he wanted to return [to New York]. I wasn't ready for that, and six months or so later, we split up. We're still very much in touch. My 10-year-old son, Marlowe, and his first child were born six hours apart. I was 19 when I appeared with Hugo Weaving in Peaches. The love scenes were really intense, but there was no sort of worry as Hugo is the most kind and gentle soul. Looking back, it would have been extremely hard for him, too, as he had a daughter around 10 years younger than me. But you'd be hard-pressed to find too many actors as professional as him.
