Striking Out series review: Amy Huberman vehicle judders to a sudden stop

Accidental family law solicitor Tara Rafferty (Amy Huberman), who operates out of a waterside pop-up law firm that you access via a coffee shop, works with such admirable speed that most cases are solved before your cappuccino gets cold. “So raw, family stuff,” she says, shaking her head in the final episode of the series. And she really ought to know.

Since discovering her fiancé in flagrante, and fleeing the firm they shared, she has brought swift resolutions to a short stack of overheated family cases: a court injunction against publishing a celebrity’s adulterous sex tape; an out-of-court settlement between disloyal sisters; and – in a plot worthy of a heedless telenovela – the saving of a bigamist’s life and one of his marriages (the better one).

But with the conclusion of Striking Out (RTÉ One, Sunday 9.30pm) after just four episodes, Tara – "a corporate solicitor gone walkabout" – hasn't been able to make much sense of herself yet.

“You could make a case that being taken for granted might be the best thing in the world,” Huberman’s wide-eyed lawyer tells Pete (Brahm Gallagher), the dishy American proprietor of a Dublin café called Stockholm. (Geography here, pleasingly, is just a jumping off point for negotiation.) She’s flirting, we assume, but the sentiment is perplexing all the same. Has Tara – somebody taken for granted, betrayed and left roundly unsupported – learned nothing? At least Pete recognises her deeper tragedy when greeting the seldom seen Dee (Sallay Garnett) as “her only friend”. He’s right.

The more troubling thing about Striking Out is Tara's passivity and isolation: all she has been given are colleagues, trading one set for another. Her father, we now discover, is a barrister. "All rise," she jokes with him in the garden. Even Tara's play is all work.

Given such restricted scope, it’s hard to either develop a character or land a story arc, further constrained by such a short run. (You worry that a show as attractively glossy, abounding with aerial shots of a handsome Dublin, is too much to sustain longer term.) Instead, writers Rob Heyland and series creator James Phelan abruptly vary the client list and throw random spanners in the works.

If there's a theme to the episode, it's about how things look versus how things are, which, coincidentally, is where people may have trouble with Striking Out and the city it represents. Or, as Tara puts it, "I know it's appearance, but it's also important."

Agreeing to take on the case of two negligent parents, John and Lydia, whose child has been taken into state care, Tara's solution is to split them up (Lydia, a methadone addict, is dismissed) and have John apply for sole custody. John, for his part, gets something like a makeover: two favours later and he lands a nine to three job and a two-bedroom house with an island kitchen and garden. Social realism is not Striking Out's strong point.

But what is? Things fall apart as improbably as they come together. Eric (Rory Keenan), Tara's fiancé, wages a smarm offensive to win her back, and crumples when he fails, but he has been given nothing else to redeem him and a less claustrophobic show would have discarded him long ago. An uncomfortable motif through this series has been the trivialisation of betrayal: this week, Tara's dad joins the list of forgiven philanderers, following a sex addict, a cheating husband/sister, and a long-term secret bigamist. It's as though the universe is trying to tell Tara something. Her writers certainly are: Phelan's show was originally titled Cheaters, a better indication of where its sympathies lie.

That may also explain the awkward judders in its tone; so slick, under Lisa James Larsson’s direction, that it almost slips off the screen, but plot resolutions are so implausibly absurd that the addition of a laugh track wouldn’t make much difference. What happened to her dad’s other woman? “She died,” he shrugs. How does the abandoned Lydia respond to losing custody of her son? “John must have him,” she nods. How does Pete react to the suspicious loss of his business? He asks Tara to dinner on his houseboat.

All the narrative pivots seem just as perfunctory. Meg (Fiona O’Shaughnessy), the breathy office cyber sleuth, turns out to be a double dealer. “Someone is trying to destroy us,” glowers good-hearted Ray (Emmet Byrne), arrested on his last day of community service. And – lo and behold – there’s Meg and Richard Dunbar, the show’s only baddie, debriefing over a conspiratorial outdoor stroll while Tara and Eric, now confederates, watch from nearby. All of this is offered as a cliffhanger, but to my eyes we are roughly back at square one, given less a series finale than a sudden adjournment.