Matt is such a prat that it hints at Clean Sweep going in a more self-aware direction, but his fem-centric mystery-writing does seem to be the limit of the series’ humour. Luckily, Shelly is distracted by a smooth stay-at-home dad/writer called Matt, who tells her that he writes “mysteries, fem-centric” and a blog about being an American in Ireland, in which he declares himself a “dilf”. To add to this soup of drama, Shelly is on the committee for Niall’s end-of-year leavers’ party, which means navigating the world of those highly strung TV character parents who run school events as if they are in charge of a small nation. The three kids have difficulties of their own: the youngest, Niall, has cystic fibrosis middle child Caitlin is going through puberty and her eldest, Derek, is a weed-smoking bad boy who lies and tries to steal money out of his mother’s handbag. She is having trouble sleeping, the family is “a little over-extended financially”, and her husband Jason (Barry Ward), who happens to be a Garda, is a womaniser who is never at home. It then steps back in time by a few hours to tell us how Shelly got to the Lady Macbeth stage of her day. As the whole series is bathed in that grey-blue nordic noir light, we can safely assume that she hasn’t just dropped spaghetti bolognese down her front. Peaky Blinders’ Charlene McKenna is Shelly Mohan, a busy mother of three whom we first meet as she is frantically scrubbing something red and sticky out of her clothing. Clean Sweep is a serviceable, perfectly watchable Irish thriller, if you can get past its many credulity-stretching twists and its frequent excursions into the just plain silly.
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