Dinosaurs Season 2 Review – This funny, heart-warming comedy is a classic | television

TThe second series of Dinosaurs begins on the Isle of Wight – just a seven-hour drive and ferry from our heroine’s beloved Glasgow. my darling. Nina (Ashley Storey) has spent eight months excavating, the job she got at the end of series one, and despite her discovery of a metazoan dung beetle and connection with an old American man called Clayton who is so charming that he can call her ‘Scotland’ and get away with it, she is homesick.

She misses Lee, her boyfriend who used to make her morning coffee outside the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where she worked in the paleontology department (no With the filthy grave robbers in the monuments.) She misses watching The Real Housewives with her sister, Evie, at their takeaway Tuesdays, and wandering the “dodgy little parks in case a murder is discovered.” She is all set to return home when she is asked to stay for another year. Will she choose her precious old rocks, or will she head to the exact midway point between the Isle of Wight and Glasgow to reunite with Lee? Thus begins the mad dash (in a very slow carriage) to a park bench in Knutsford, and the happy return of this hilarious, exhilarating and pioneering sitcom.

I say secret because at first glance, Dinosaur treads the same ground as any other British sitcom about loving but dysfunctional families, regional quirks, a good dose of farce, and the requisite annoyingly kind-willed story. But all of this so-called normalcy is undermined by Nina’s autistic perspective. (The biggest joke is, of course, that neurotypicals are too much.) Nina’s autism is central to every dinosaur scene, not what it’s about at all. In this way, even among the welcome slew of shows focusing on people with autism, it feels fresh, unique, and free of mindless stereotypes.

And so on to Glasgow via Knutsford, where – spoiler alert – it never appears to me. Back home, everything changed. Nina’s office at the museum has been moved, as has her office, to make room for a social room and hydration station. Her local sandwich shop has stopped selling tuna melts because “no one likes hot tuna” and “we only serve one a day to some women who died last year.” “That was me!” Nina protests. And there was almost a tuna meltdown, as Evie fondly calls it. Once again, it’s the weird pair dynamic between the sisters (closely followed by the adorable awkwardness between Nina and Lee) that really makes the dinosaur bones shine: their little finger hooks, the sudden switch to Real Housewives accents and their quick Glasgow banter about sarcasm, ping-pong, and big heads (and no, I’m not giving definitions — just watch it). Or when Nina is in distress and Evie simply says “Heavy blanket?” Cut to Nina lying on the couch with Evie lying on top of her and weighing her down.

This series is more self-assured than the first, bringing together jokes about Mary Anning and childbirth, Gloria Steinem and Tebay’s services off the M6, David Attenborough and a fruity book of short stories by Nina called Romancing the Bone. The cast is, once again, top notch. Nina’s older brother, Beau, spends most of his time in the family shed, and fears that Evie’s best friend, Amber, is pregnant. Ranch, Evie’s feminist husband, is up to the same old things – buying a drying machine to make fruit leathers and cooking pasta from a book for the Pope. I love the portrayal of Declan, Nina’s older classmate, who may not have been diagnosed but is definitely autistic. Performing with an open mic (Amber: “Mean white guys singing in public is one of my kinks — it’s the shift from delusional confidence to defeat”), Lee sings a beautiful ballad whose chorus sums up the dinosaur spirit: “It doesn’t matter what you do / As long as what you do is right.”

Like Hackney in Starstruck, where the dinosaur is in on the sweet, spiky mess (though the dinosaur is more subversive, cruder, and better), Glasgow is a major character. And Scotland’s largest – and beloved – city, where I spent one of the best decades of my life, has never looked more beautiful: all the gleaming tenements, the tree-lined roads and the boogie bars all boarded up. This is another way in which dinosaurs are quietly extreme. When can we ever see this Glasgow on TV?

Both the safety of dinosaurs and the intensity of their gag rate in Glasgow go back to their origins. It is the creation of Storey – who received an autism diagnosis in her early 30s and is the daughter of comedian Janie Godley, who died between the first and second series – and Matilda Curtis, daughter of director Simon Curtis and actress Elizabeth McGovern. It’s a show that came out of Storrie’s real-life experience and is the product of close female collaboration. The result is a classic comedy full of light, shadow, and big emotions. As a mother of an autistic child, the simplest way I can describe it is that it feels real, and gives me some big feelings of my own. In short, I love it.