‘The Hairdresser Mysteries’ Season 1 Review: A Blow Dry Into the Bizarre

Sally Phillips has spent decades being funny on British television, and ‘The Hairdresser Mysteries’ finally hands her a whole village to be funny in. The six part BBC One series casts her as Lily Petal, a high flying city hairdresser who trades the competitive salon circuit for a shopfront on a cobbled street in a fictional northern town called Blossom Vale, only to find every client’s head full of secrets.

The show arrived on BBC One and iPlayer this July as part of a deliberate rebuild of the corporation’s daytime slate, filling the gap left by the cancellation of the long running soap ‘Doctors’. That backstory matters because it explains the show’s mission, a scrappy attempt to prove daytime drama can still pull viewers, and it shows in the sheer confidence of the setting, all Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep needle drops and a Viking themed chip shop that plays it completely straight.

Once you settle into an episode, the actual critical experience of ‘The Hairdresser Mysteries’ is somewhere between a nostalgia trip and a fever dream. Lily solves crimes using something close to hairdressing telepathy, reading gossip out of scalps like a psychic with a comb, and the show commits to that premise with a straight face rather than a wink, which somehow makes it funnier and stranger at once.

Phillips is doing exactly the kind of work she is built for, playing sincerity next to absurdity without ever breaking the spell, and Charlotte Jordan as her assistant Clary gives the show a grounded second gear whenever things threaten to float away entirely. The supporting cast, all gossiping neighbours and eccentric shopkeepers, lean hard into caricature, and for a show explicitly built around cosy chaos, that works far more often than it should.

Where the series stumbles is in its craft rather than its concept. The seventies production design leans so heavily into loud wallpaper and busy set dressing that some rooms feel more like a costume department storage closet than a lived in decade, and the wig work in particular struggles to sell the era it is chasing. The plotting also treats its central mysteries with a lightness that borders on indifference, cases resolve almost as an afterthought to the vibe, which is a choice, just not always a satisfying one.

Phillips has described the show as something close to a warm reaction against a colder cultural moment, telling press including HELLO! that the world of Blossom Vale is a reminder people can be strange and still be forgiven for it. That sentiment threads through every episode, and it gives the show a soft emotional core that keeps the whodunit machinery from feeling cold even when the mysteries themselves are thin.

What ultimately makes ‘The Hairdresser Mysteries’ worth a look is its total lack of self consciousness. This is not a show smirking at its own silliness from a safe distance, it is fully inside the bit, and there is something genuinely disarming about a crime drama that treats a missing teacup with the same gravity as a Viking longship shaped chip shop. It will not be for anyone hunting tight plotting or gritty realism, but as a piece of pure tonal commitment, it mostly earns its cosiness.

I came away from ‘The Hairdresser Mysteries’ entertained more often than not, charmed by its total sincerity even when the mysteries themselves barely register as mysteries at all. The wigs need work and the plotting needs teeth, but Phillips carries the whole strange enterprise on personality alone, and that is worth rewarding. I am giving it a 6 out of 10.

Did Lily Petal’s hairdressing intuition win you over or leave you cold, drop your verdict in the comments below.