In the latest BBC comic drama from Kay Mellor (IN THE CLUB), no sooner does registrar Kate Dickinson (Ashley Jensen, AGATHA RAISIN) get promoted to her dream job of Superintendent Registrar at th Leeds office of Births, Marriages, and Deaths than the complications start to mount. On the home front, her stepson Liam (WATERLOO ROAD's Kaya Moore) moves in after having run away from his mother's and left university over a bad breakup, son Tom (SHAMELESS' Rhys Cadman) is gearing up for a school trip to Paris with unending fees, daughter Lucy (IN THE CLUB's Lily Mae) is tugged between the extremes of adolescence, both begging for a pet dog and making questionalbe friends online, and Kate has decided she wants to finally tie the not with her Detective Sergeant boyfriend (Lucy's father) Rob (Adrian Bower, JUDE) of fourteen years (everyone else having just assumed they were already married). At work, co-worker James (GAME OF THRONES' Mark Stanley) has announced that he will be coming to work from here on dressed as a woman and wants to be called "Jamie", things have been left up in the air with the unresolved sexual tension with handsome co-worker Rick (VERA's Kenny Doughty) after a drunken one-off in the strongroom during the Christmas party, and acting superintendent Judy (INSPECTOR LEWIS' Rebecca Front)- who believes that Kate has stolen her job - is blackmailing her with CCTV video of her and Rick in flagrante delicto. The day-to-day dealings of births, marriages, and deaths both strengthen and question Kate's resolve about commitment and the brevity of life as she bends protocal to marry Simon (James Burrows, EDEN LAKE) and his cancer-stricken fiance whose health has taken a turn for the worse after the stressful delivery of twins (of which only one has survived), battles Judy on her stance on gay marriages, takes Jamie in when his wife throws him out and threatens to move with the kids, trying to discourage Rick's romantic interest in her but becoming concerned about his closeness to a bereaved client (Gracie Kelly), and suspects that the marriage between a young Muslim man (VERA's Noof McEwan) and a pregnant Slovenian teeanger may be a case of human trafficking (possibly related to Rob's murder case of an unidentified young Eastern European woman pulled out of the river). The series ends on a cliffhanger but it is difficult to imagine that a second series will be greenlighted. Jenson is more likable and sympathetic here than in AGATHA RAISIN as a not-always-sympathetic character and Front also ekes out some depth from what could have been a flat Kim Davis-esque villain, but the soapy love triangle "angle" upon which the series hinges is not as compelling as the criminal investigation.