SMILF, which earned creator Frankie Shaw nominations for both Best Comedy and Best Actress at the 2018 Golden Globes, is now streaming first and only on Showmax in Africa. Watch now »
In addition to executive producing, directing and writing SMILF, Frankie plays Bridgette Bird, a 20-something from South Boston whose desires for relationships, sex and a career collide with the realities of working-class single motherhood.
The raw, honest comedy is based on her Sundance Film Festival Award-winning short film of the same name – and her own experiences of having a child in her mid-twenties. (Watch the NSFW Vimeo Staff Pick short film that started it all here.)
SMILF debuted with the third biggest premiere week audience for a comedy ever on Showtime – the network that brought you Shameless – and ended the year on multiple Best of 2017 lists, including Deadline, The Los Angeles Times, and Vogue. Forbes described it as “the show Girls wished it could be", while Wired wrote that, “In 2018, TV needs to take a cue from SMILF” and stay “as intimate as it was in 2017”.
“From its first episode, the refreshingly honest point of view of SMILF broke through with audiences, the press and on social media,” said Gary Levine, Showtime’s president of programming. “Frankie Shaw is a creative force to be reckoned with; her show is funny and forthright, pointed and poignant, irreverent and relevant, all at once.”
SMILF stands for “Single Mother I’d Like To F*k” and is meant to be ironic. “There’s no real room for a woman’s existence in the word MILF,” Frankie told The New Yorker. “By getting inside her life experience, we are in a sense changing the meaning, reclaiming it.”
The hit comedy series also features multiple Emmy winner Rosie O’Donnell in her first series regular TV role, as Bridgette’s stubborn mom, while Golden Globe and Emmy nominee Connie Britton (Nashville, Friday Night Lights) guest stars as her unstable boss, Ally, in four episodes. Frankie’s fellow executive producers include Oscar-nominee Michael London (Sideways) and six-time Emmy nominee Lee Eisenberg (The Office).
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