Spreadsheet keeps a sex spreadsheet and the joke is that the data never lies

The premise of Spreadsheet is this: Lauren (Katherine Parkinson) is a recently divorced family lawyer living in Hobart who decides to approach her post-marriage sex life with the same organisational rigour she applies to her legal work. She creates a spreadsheet. She logs her encounters. She rates them. She colour-codes the data. The spreadsheet becomes the structuring device for the entire show, and the joke is that the data is always honest even when Lauren is not.

This should not work. A sex comedy built around a literal spreadsheet sounds like something a development executive would pitch, get a polite laugh, and then never mention again. But Spreadsheet ran for two seasons on Paramount+ (2021-2022), totalling fourteen episodes, and the thing that makes it work is Katherine Parkinson. Parkinson, best known internationally for Jen Barber on The IT Crowd, brings a specific quality to Lauren that the show desperately needs: she is funny without being performatively funny, awkward without being a caricature of awkwardness, and sexually frank in a way that feels grounded rather than shocking.

The spreadsheet conceit is cleverer than it first appears. Each episode features Lauren’s encounters with different partners, and the spreadsheet functions as both a narrative framing device and a running commentary. The data appears on screen, the categories shift as Lauren refines her criteria, and the gap between what the spreadsheet records and what Lauren actually experienced becomes the source of most of the show’s best comedy. The spreadsheet says one thing. Lauren’s face says another. The audience sits in the middle.

Hobart as a character

One of the most striking things about Spreadsheet is its setting. Hobart is not a common location for Australian comedy. Sydney and Melbourne dominate the landscape, with occasional forays into Brisbane or regional settings. Hobart is different. It is small enough that Lauren runs into her ex-husband (Rowan Witt) regularly, small enough that her professional and personal lives overlap constantly, small enough that anonymity is functionally impossible. The show uses this smallness as a pressure cooker. Lauren cannot compartmentalise because the city will not let her.

The production shoots Hobart with an eye for its specific beauty: the harbour, the light, the architectural mix of colonial sandstone and mid-century concrete. But it does not romanticise the setting. This is not a tourism advertisement. It is a working city where a woman is trying to have a private life in a place where privacy does not really exist.

Parkinson and Witt

The relationship between Lauren and her ex-husband Jake, played by Rowan Witt, is the show’s emotional anchor. Witt (who Australian audiences may remember as the spoon-bending kid from The Matrix, a piece of trivia that never stops being surprising) plays Jake as a man who is genuinely bewildered by the divorce. He is not a villain. He is not abusive or cruel. He is just wrong for Lauren in ways that took years to become visible, and the show is smart enough to let both characters be right about different things.

Their co-parenting dynamic is handled with a casualness that feels true. They argue about logistics, not ideology. They are polite in front of the children and exhausted behind closed doors. The scenes between Parkinson and Witt have a texture that the more farcical sexual encounters sometimes lack, and the show is at its best when it lets these two occupy the same frame and just talk.

Female sexuality without the lecture

There is a version of Spreadsheet that would use its premise to deliver a message about female sexual liberation. The show is aware of this version and largely avoids it. Lauren is not on a journey of empowerment. She is not learning to reclaim her body or her desires. She is a woman in her forties who wants to have sex and also wants to maintain control of the situation, and the comedy comes from the fact that control is exactly what sex tends to resist.

The show does not moralise about Lauren’s choices. It does not punish her for having casual sex. It does not reward her for it either. The spreadsheet is not a symbol of empowerment or dysfunction. It is a coping mechanism that is also funny, and the show trusts the audience to hold both of those things at once.

The Bump comparison

It is worth placing Spreadsheet alongside Bump (Stan, 2021-present), another Australian show that lets its female characters be messy without turning that messiness into a moral framework. Bump is a drama rather than a comedy, and its central character is younger (a teenager who unexpectedly gives birth in the first episode), but both shows share a willingness to let women make decisions that are neither good nor bad, just complicated.

Australian television has a history of strong female characters, but the tendency has been to make those characters admirable. Wentworth’s Bea Smith is tough. Janet King’s Janet is principled. Total Control’s Alex is politically sharp. Lauren and Bump’s Oly are something different. They are just people making choices with incomplete information and dealing with the consequences in real time. The shows do not ask the audience to admire them. They ask the audience to watch them, which is a less demanding and more interesting request.

Two seasons and done

Spreadsheet ended after its second season. Fourteen episodes. The show did not overstay, and it did not resolve neatly. Lauren is still figuring things out at the end, the spreadsheet is still open, and the data is still accumulating. Whether Paramount+ chose not to continue or the creators decided the story was told is unclear, but the result is a show that is exactly the right length. Two seasons of a comedy built on a single conceit is enough. The joke lands. The characters breathe. The spreadsheet fills up. You close the laptop and move on.