Thirty years after its debut, the BBC cult series 'This Life' is being hailed as the best legal drama of the 1990s, celebrating its anniversary with a rerun introduced by star Daniela Nardini. The show, which followed a group of trainee lawyers living in a shared house in London, captured the hedonistic spirit of Cool Britannia with its unflinching portrayal of sex, drugs, and swearing.
Creator Amy Jenkins revealed that BBC Two controller Michael Jackson wanted a cool drama for young people, and she agreed only on the condition that there were no courtroom scenes. 'It wasn't actually about law at all,' she said, drawing instead on the rave scene for inspiration. The characters were loosely based on her own life and friends.
The show's central relationship was the love-hate dynamic between posh Miles (Jack Davenport) and fiery Anna (Daniela Nardini), a will-they-won't-they that became a homegrown Ross and Rachel. Nardini's Anna, a chain-smoking vulnerable hot mess, was a proto-Fleabag and won her a Bafta. Phoebe Waller-Bridge cited it as a formative influence.
Jenkins noted that showing middle-class graduates drinking, taking drugs, and having casual sex was 'oddly radical' at the time, as that generation had never been represented on TV. The show also featured groundbreaking scenes of therapy, years before HBO's 'The Sopranos' made it mainstream.
Now, 30 years later, the series is celebrated not just for its cultural impact but as a benchmark for legal dramas that transcended the genre, focusing instead on messy, authentic human lives.
