A Family Secret Spirals Into Chaos in BBC’s New Comedy, Can You Keep a Secret?
BBC One’s latest sitcom doesn’t begin with a punchline — it begins with a shock. A woman in a beige coat and green jumper walks into a room and freezes, stunned by something the camera won’t yet reveal. That sense of surprise — the moment life tilts sideways — is the engine that drives Can You Keep a Secret?, a sharply observed family comedy about people who love each other dearly and lie to each other constantly.
The series centers on the Fendons, a seemingly ordinary West Country family whose lives unravel when a plan meant to secure financial peace becomes a criminal headache. Debbie Fendon, played with warm mischief by comedy icon Dawn French, has always believed that a practical solution is better than a perfect one. But when practicality tips into fraud, and a staged “death” refuses to stay in the ground, Debbie discovers that even the best-kept secrets eventually start breathing again.
For their son Harry — portrayed by Craig Roberts (Submarine, The Fundamentals of Caring) — the revelation that his father is suddenly alive again is more than inconvenient. He has mourned, moved forward, and quietly counted on the insurance payment that promised to stabilize his young family’s finances. Now, with a resurrected dad and suspicious paperwork, the pressure mounts. Harry is earnest, neurotic, and constantly outpaced by events; he is also, painfully, in over his head.
Making matters much worse is Harry’s wife Neha, played by Mandip Gill (Doctor Who, This Time Next Year). Neha is grounded, ambitious — and a local police officer. She is the character least tolerant of nonsense, and yet nonsense finds her anyway. The more she senses that something is off with her in-laws, the more the show tightens the comedic screws. One discovery could bring the entire scheme crashing down.
The premise may sound like caper territory, but Can You Keep a Secret? is rooted in everyday anxieties: money, aging parents, young children, and the burden of responsibility that arrives before you feel ready for it. Harry finds himself “sandwiched between two generations of toddlers,” as the show wryly puts it — caring for his own children while managing parents whose choices are increasingly reckless. The humor comes as much from emotional truth as from farce.
Visually, the series leans into domestic coziness with a streak of danger. We see images of a woman in a red coat, standing in darkness with a torch clenched between her teeth, gripping a mysterious scrap of paper. We watch two people hiding in a cupboard, sheepish and clinking glasses while the world outside spins. There’s a sense that the Fendons are always improvising, never quite getting ahead of their latest lie.
Filmed and set in the West Country, the show embraces its sense of place. Church spires, narrow lanes, and village greens contrast with the chaos playing out just beneath the surface. The locations feel familiar, but the behavior unfolding inside living rooms and parish halls is anything but.
Behind the camera, Can You Keep a Secret? arrives with an impressive pedigree. It is a co-production from Big Talk Studios, Mayhay Studios, and CBS Studios for BBC One and BBC iPlayer, written and created by Simon Mayhew-Archer and directed by Simon Hynd. Executive producers include Kenton Allen, Simon Mayhew-Archer, Dawn French, and Toby Welch, with Lauriel Martin and Joe Scantlebury producing. It was commissioned by BBC Comedy director Jon Petrie, with Tanya Qureshi serving as commissioning editor, and is distributed globally by Paramount Global Content Distribution.
Tonally, the series lands somewhere between family sitcom and suburban crime story — a gentle comedy wrapped around a very big lie. The Bonnie-and-Clyde comparison isn’t accidental: Debbie and her husband aren’t hardened criminals, but desperation and ingenuity have nudged them into territory from which it may be impossible to retreat. The tension comes less from whether they will get caught than from whether the family will survive the fallout intact.
What makes Can You Keep a Secret? resonate is its relatability. Nearly every family has a secret; few of them are this dramatic, but the emotional dynamics feel real. There are the quiet negotiations between spouses, the resentments between generations, the attempts to protect one another that cause more harm than good. The show understands that love often arrives disguised as bad decisions.
As the episodes unfold, the central question lingers in the title: Can Debbie Fendon and her family truly keep their secret — or will one of them finally spill the beans? The fun lies in watching everyone try, and fail, to stay one step ahead of the truth.
With its mix of warmth, wit, and escalating absurdity — and with Dawn French at its mischievous center — Can You Keep a Secret? offers exactly what British sitcoms do best: laughter edged with recognition, and a reminder that families are rarely as tidy as they pretend to be.
