Butterflies takes us into the life and mind of Ria Parkinson, an attractive housewife in her mid-forties going through a mid-life crisis. She is unquestionably devoted to her family, yet feels a gaping hole in her life that she can't identify. Her husband Ben is a successful dentist, her two teenage sons Russell and Adam tend to find trouble for themselves but are essentially good-natured, and they live in a comfortable suburban home. Ria, chronically introspective and prey to ther own wistful musings on the meaning of life, feels the need to shake things up for herself.Things get shaken considerably when Ria meets a man named Leonard in a restaurant one day. Leonard is a handsome, charming, and successful businessman who is also unhappily married and indeed separated from his wife. He has already begun playing the field but tends to feel sorry for himself for not having found true love in his life. His driving offenses have also cost him his license for a year, and he must rely on his droll chauffeur Thomas to get around. Leonard makes no bones about his attraction to Ria, and she in turn finds herself attracted to his self-deprecating manner. Beofre they know it they've begun a clandestine affair -- ostensibly plantonic, but the growing sexual tension between them often has Ria agonizing over how to proceed.
Butterflies tackles this issue of adultery as well as other highly-charged topics (at one point Russell gets his girlfriend pregant) with considerable humor and clever dialogue, and most episodes even include a bit of slapstick. However, creator/writer Carla Lane's philosphy seems to teeter on the edge of condoning adultery, for women anyway. Her scripts for Butterflies and her subsequent series Solo (starring Felicity Kendal) aren't quite as easy on the adulterous men of the world. However, Lane deserves credit for fleshing out her characters and making Ria truly torn about her feelings both for her husband and for Leonard.
Butterflies has been criticized with some justification, for its somewhat melancholy tone overall. Ria's perpetual angst and endless introspection can leave the viewer confused whenever big laughs suddenly give way to her woe-is-me demeanor. Perhaps the series might be better described as a comedy-drama iinstead of a sitcom. For those who prefer their sitcoms to be more multi-dimensional (and even existential) than the majority of television offerings, Butterflies in its best moements proves a truly intriguing work.
Like many of her sitcom-writing peers, Carla Lane believes that even a successful television program should quit while it's ahead. After twenty-eight episodes, she determined that Butterflies had run its course. As is the case with the more established television writers in Britain, Lane's decision to end the series was the final word on the subject. "In England they don't press you to go on," she said in a magazine interview. "You [Americans] think in terms of hundreds [of episodes]. I think in terms of how that story can be told well." When she was invited to Hollywood to discuss developing an American version of Butterflies, she soon fled back to England, appalled by the ideas American television executives offered her that, in Lane's opinion, would have cannibalized her heartfelt work.
Butterflies star Wendy Craig has also costarred in Brighton Belles, an unsuccessful attempt to adapt The Golden Girls to the British way of life. Nicholas Lyndhurst and Geoffrey Palmer have both become fixtures in British sitcoms since Butterflies. Lyndhurst has starred in Only Fools and Horses, The Two of Us, The Piglet Files, and Good Night Sweetheart. Geoffrey Palmer can be seen in an earlier, recurring role as Reginald Perrin's vague-minded brother-in-law, Jimmy. Other Britcoms in which Palmer has starred include Executive Stress, Hot Metal, and As Times Goes By.
Thank you to Angela, who wrote to tell me about the book in which she found this excerpt. The book is BEST OF THE BRITCOMS: FROM FAWLTY TOWERS TO ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS by Garry Berman -- Paperback - 160 pages (November, 1999), Taylor Pub; ISBN: 0878331603. This book is available online for $15.16 plus shipping from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders (among others).