Wellmania lets Celeste Barber be terrible and that is its best decision

Celeste Barber has 9.2 million Instagram followers, which is more than the population of Switzerland and roughly the same number of people who watched MasterChef in 2010. Her entire brand is built on the gap between aspirational content and real bodies, real faces, real kitchens that have not been styled by a production designer. She is, in the language of social media, relatable, which is a word that has been drained of all meaning but in her case is approximately accurate. People like her because she seems like someone they could have a wine with at a barbecue. The question Wellmania had to answer was whether that translates to a scripted half-hour, and the answer is: sort of, and the “sort of” is what makes it interesting.

Wellmania premiered on Netflix in March 2023. It is based (loosely) on Brigid Delaney’s book Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness, adapted by Benjamin Law, and it stars Barber as Liv Healy, an Australian food writer living in New York who is forced back to Sydney by a health scare and proceeds to barrel through every wellness trend the eastern suburbs can offer. Juice cleanses. Sound baths. Colonics. A wellness retreat run by a man whose serenity is a form of aggression. The show treats the wellness industry as a target-rich environment, which it is, and lets Barber loose in it, which is either the right call or a structural gamble depending on how you feel about Barber being the loudest person in every room she enters.

The likability question

Here is what I think the show gets right. Liv Healy is not likeable. She is selfish, she is dismissive of her friends’ problems, she treats her body as an inconvenience, and she has the specific kind of charm that charismatic people deploy to avoid accountability. The show does not try to fix this. It does not give her a redemption arc in the first season. It does not soften her with a backstory that explains why she is the way she is. It presents her as a woman who has been getting away with being terrible for long enough that she has confused getting away with it for being fine, and then it takes away the getting-away-with-it part and watches what happens.

This is brave for a Netflix comedy. The platform’s algorithm, as far as anyone outside Netflix understands it, rewards engagement, and engagement correlates with characters the audience wants to spend time with. Liv is not always someone you want to spend time with. She is someone you recognise, which is different and arguably harder to sustain across eight episodes. Barber commits to it. She does not wink. She does not break the performance to remind you that she, Celeste Barber, is actually a nice person. She plays Liv as Liv, and Liv is a lot.

The Instagram-to-screen problem

The transition from social media to scripted television is not a natural one, and the list of people who have done it well is short. Look, most Instagram comedians are doing one thing very well in 30-second bursts. A scripted show requires you to do twelve things across eight half-hours, including some things that are not funny, like conveying emotional vulnerability without making it a bit. Barber handles this better than I expected and less well than the show needs. She is genuinely funny in the physical comedy. She is solid in the scenes where Liv’s health scare becomes real and the jokes stop. She is weakest in the transitional scenes, the connective tissue between set pieces, where the character needs to exist as a person rather than a performance.

This is not a failure of talent. It is a structural problem with casting someone whose public persona is so defined that the audience cannot fully separate performer from character. When Barber does something on screen that Barber would do on Instagram, you see Barber. When she does something that only Liv would do, you see Liv. The ratio favours Barber more than it should in the early episodes and shifts toward Liv as the season progresses, which suggests that either Barber grew into the role or the writers learned how to write for the gap between the two.

Sydney as a wellness theme park

The show is set in Sydney, specifically the kind of Sydney where people spend $14 on a green juice without flinching. Bondi, Surry Hills, the northern beaches. This is not the Sydney of Bump or The Combination. It is a Sydney that exists and is real and is also a very particular slice of the city that international audiences will mistake for the whole thing. Netflix presumably wanted this. A Sydney that reads as aspirational to a viewer in Manchester or Minneapolis, with enough local flavour to be specific but not so much that it becomes alienating.

The locations work. The wellness retreat in the hinterland is beautiful and slightly sinister, which is exactly what wellness retreats are. The eastern suburbs apartment Liv crashes in belongs to her best friend, Amy (JR Reyne), whose life Liv systematically disrupts with the casual confidence of someone who assumes her problems are more interesting than yours. The Sydney in Wellmania is a city full of people who have optimised their lives to the point where the optimisation has become the problem. This is a good setting for a comedy. It is also a setting that a global audience might read as satire when it is actually just observation.

What the global audience sees

The question hanging over any Australian show on Netflix is whether the specificity survives export. Wellmania is less specifically Australian than Bump or Deadloch or The Tourist. Its references are to wellness culture, which is borderless, and its humour is broad enough to land without local knowledge. This is both its advantage and its limitation. It will play in thirty countries because it is not asking anyone to understand Medicare or council rates or the specific social dynamics of a Bankstown kebab shop at midnight. It will also feel, to Australian audiences, slightly thin in the places where more specific writing would have given it texture.

Benjamin Law’s scripts are sharp in the dialogue and occasionally loose in the plotting. Individual scenes land. The macro story, Liv confronting her health, her selfishness, her relationship to her body, proceeds in the expected directions at roughly the expected pace. Honestly, if you have seen a wellness-satire comedy before, you can predict the shape of Wellmania’s season from the premise alone. What you cannot predict is Barber, who is unpredictable in the best scenes and merely energetic in the worst, and that unpredictability is enough to carry the show past its structural limitations.

The verdict, such as it is

Wellmania is not the best Australian comedy on a streaming platform. That is Deadloch, comfortably. It is not the worst. It is a show that made one excellent decision, letting its star be genuinely, unrepentantly terrible, and then surrounded that decision with writing that is sometimes equal to it and sometimes not. Barber can do this. The question for a potential second season is whether the show can build a structure that uses what she can do and stops leaning on what Instagram already proved. Give Liv somewhere to go that is not a juice bar or a sound bath. Let her be terrible in new environments. The wellness satire has a shelf life. Celeste Barber does not.