After watching Kat Sadler on screen in BBC’s Such Brave Girls, I had high expectations that she would be effortlessly witty and hilarious, but I was still surprised when, within five minutes of logging onto our video call together, I was in fits of laughter first thing on a Tuesday morning.

Don’t worry: you don’t need to book a chat with her to experience Sadler’s warm and infectious energy – the actor and comedian has managed to bottle it up into her new series.

Such Brave Girls is not your typical family sitcom. It follows the story of sisters Josie (played by Sadler) and Billie, along with their single mother Deb, as they attempt to navigate their lives as a family armed with nothing but debt, poor judgment and a desperate need for love and affection. It’s a refreshing exploration of relationships and mental health – particularly focusing on how we cope and talk about our mental health with our loved ones.

It’s a show that I haven’t been able to stop telling people about, even though I finished watching it weeks ago. The story and characters make fun of themselves – with genius comedic timing – while tackling hard topics such as trauma, mental health issues and complicated relationships. For Sadler, seeing Such Brave Girls on screen is the final part of a long process. The writer started working on the show in 2020 after a catch-up phone call with her younger sister, Lizzie Davidson (who plays Billie), in which they both shared what had been going on in their lives.

Davidson had accrued thousands of pounds worth of debt and Sadler had been sectioned during lockdown. Sadler wanted to capture the way her family talk to each other when it comes to topics like mental health.

“There’s this dark and numb side of it because when it affects your life so much and you have to talk about it, it’s not something you can deal with sensitively every day,” she tells Stylist. “I wanted people to see, understand and maybe even relate to how the characters talk to each other about their trauma and vulnerabilities because that’s how we deal with it in my family. Maybe people aren’t saying the kind of things we say in the show in their own homes, but I actually think they are as it makes it less scary.”

A lot of Josie and Billie’s experiences in the series are taken from real-life inspiration. “They talk and interact with each other the same way my sister and I do – turning our own experiences into something that gives us back some power in the situations we’ve been in by putting it into the sitcom space.”

Kat Sadler on her BBC series Such Brave Girls: “We turned our own experiences into something that gave us back some power”