TV Review: At Home With The Furys: Tyson Fury’s bipolar journey makes for compelling viewing

Tyson and Paris Fury and their six children in At Home With The Furys.

Television reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch At Home With The Furys.

SHE SAW

Never has a reality television series captured our desperate attempts to escape existential dread so well as At Home with the Furys. We don’t watch reality telly so that claim is unfounded, but this series is dealing with some heavy material that can’t be easily resolved with the reality-TV tradition of a handsome prize package for the last one standing.

I hate boxing but I have come to understand it a bit more through this, in many ways formulaic, series. Not the history or techniques or business of boxing but the motivation behind it. Tyson Fury - the Gypsy King - is someone who has already achieved everything he’d ever set his mind to. He’s the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, famous, absurdly rich, has a loving wife and six adoring children, but he’s not content.

The supposed premise of the series is in the title - Tyson at home with his family now he’s officially retired from boxing. But his persistent desire to return to the sport that gives his life purpose is present from the start. Tyson, who has bipolar disorder, is clearly uncomfortable with the seemingly endless hours, weeks, months and years of mundane home life stretching out before him. Thirty-three is too young to retire. Humans aren’t supposed to exist like that, without any real existential threat or suffering – our minds then have to create it. Some of us have learned to trick our brain chemistry by creating physical suffering where there is none - running marathons or doing extreme workouts or fasting or ice baths. For Tyson, the suffering he needs to feel joy in his life is being punched dangerously hard by someone who also needs to be beaten up to feel content.

Tyson’s wife Paris is the real hero of this series. No one needs to punch her in the face for her to know suffering because managing a house with six kids and a bipolar husband who oscillates between manic highs and suicidal lows is struggle enough. She displays enormous compassion for Tyson’s mental health battles, while not being afraid of putting him in his place. Allowing cameras into her home is probably the best career move she’s ever made. En route to becoming famous in her own right, she’ll have her own empire before the decade’s through.

The Furys’ eldest daughter, Venezuela, who turns 13 in the series, is one of the most interesting characters. She’s a typical teen in her hatred of most things, but she’s unusually disinterested in life. She claims to have no career goals, no relationship goals - she doesn’t want to get married as is the typical traveller trajectory - her only plans are to “sit around at home”. When she tells her mum that, Paris responds: “You’re not a proper person then are you?” And for me, that conversation really encapsulates the questions at the centre of this show: what does it mean to be a proper person and what do people need to live a proper life? And that’s not something a reality show has ever made me ponder before.

HE SAW

The difficult truth is that the source of the insanely high entertainment value and compulsive watchability at the heart of this, probably history’s best reality television series, is a mentally ill man and his family being buffeted by his illness.

The exploitation and manipulation of characters’ fragile mental states has been an important and controversial part of reality television forever, but this is the first time I’ve watched a show where the star of the show has so willingly and openly made his mental illness its centrepiece.

Even if you’re familiar with bipolar disorder, it is shocking and frightening to see the way it takes Tyson Fury from hilarious, over-the-top showman to selfish, repulsive jerk, literally in an instant.

When he’s up, presumably manic, posting ludicrous and impetuously-made Instagram videos challenging promoters to get him “half a billy” for a fight, or calling the world’s strongest man a “big dosser”, or talking about his own greatness, you’d have to go all the way back to Muhammad Ali to find a narcissist so compellingly likeable.

Tyson begins the first episode on a massive high, living large in his mansion, rich as f***, with the massive family he’s always wanted, retired and needing never to work again. He says earnestly to both his wife Paris and the camera that he can honestly say he does not want to box again, that he just wants to sit back and enjoy “the spoils of war”. To this she says that she just hopes he doesn’t “go off the rails and start thinking daftness”.

The set-up is so perfect and Tyson’s looming daftness so obvious to everyone but himself that the temptation is to believe the producers have set it up, but as Paris already knows, and we are about to learn, getting Tyson to do anything other than what he wants is both hopeless and pointless – only rarely is he able to figure out what he wants anyway, and if he does, the desire typically doesn’t last long enough for him to get it done.

It’s the middle of the first episode when we first see his bipolar disorder in action. He’s at his own daughter’s christening party, surrounded by dozens of family and friends, when he snaps and angrily tells Paris, “Never do that to me again” after she asks him to help find their missing son. He then tells her he’s had enough and is going home to walk the dogs.

“I’d really like you to stay,” she says, but it’s obvious she’s no longer talking to the person she once presumably believed she’d been marrying. The face that, seconds earlier, had been so playful and joyful has been replaced by something contorted and hateful. The shutters have come down. Tyson Fury has literally left the party.

At Home With The Furys is now streaming on Netflix.