Samantha Fink is stocking a supermarket cereal aisle when she decides to make her move.
She looks both ways to see if anyone is watching, then crouches down to fit her entire body inside the lowest shelf, closing the gap with a box of shredded wheat.
It’s not breakfast she wants — just a nap.
And it’s been nine days since her last drink.
Withdrawal is brutal, nearly guaranteeing sleepless nights. As a manager spies her trying to take a snooze in the merchandise, Sam has a gripe.
“I miss being a drunk,” she says, slowly pulling herself out of the cereal display. “There was a lot less accountability.”
“Single Drunk Female,” a new dramedy on Freeform starring Clifton-bred Sofia Black-D’Elia, follows the character as she tries to rebuild her life, stumbling all along the way.
The grocery store gig is new, and Sam is far from thrilled about it. But during a drunken public meltdown after she was fired from the BuzzFeed-like media company where she used to be a writer, she managed to assault her boss (Jon Glaser, aka Jeremy Jamm of “Parks and Recreation”) with a phone receiver. She’s lucky to not be in jail.
Even though Sam is addicted to alcohol and has seemingly torn her own world apart, Black-D’Elia (”The Mick”) maintains a spark that makes her inherently watchable. As Sam embarks upon her sobriety effort to varying levels of progress (and setbacks), the show is not so much about rooting for the character as it is defining what recovery truly means.
The show, created by Simone Finch (“The Conners”) and produced by Jenni Konner (“Girls,” “Camping”) and Leslye Headland (“Russian Doll”), premieres with back-to-back episodes 10 p.m. ET Thursday, Jan. 20 on Freeform and is available the next day on Hulu. (After the premiere, the show moves to 10:30 p.m. Thursdays.)
Sam finds friendship and community at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Finch, the series creator, had a front row seat to the recovery journey. For the most part, it’s her own life.
“Every single AA room is different from the next,” Black-D’Elia tells NJ Advance Media. “This is in no way representative of everybody’s recovery experience. This is really Simone’s story.”
This definitely isn’t a “Euphoria”-inspired chronicle of intoxication and addiction — yes, drunk driving is involved, but everyone’s over 18. Though Sam is no stranger to depression and addiction can be a heavy subject, the show often maintains a light touch. Sam’s low moments, and the scenarios she concocts to serve her interests, are sometimes their own comedy as she starts to face a sober reality.
“It was important to all of us that it didn’t feel like doom and gloom,” Black-D’Elia, 30, says of the series. “Simone says this all the time — getting sober saved her life. AA saved her life. These people that she’s met along the way saved her life. And that’s a beautiful thing. There’s hope in that.”
A bright ensemble cast, including Sam’s mother Carol (Ally Sheedy), her friend Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington), ex-best friend Brit (Sasha Compère), sober (and cautious) love interest James (Garrick Bernard), patient sponsor Olivia (Rebecca Henderson) and sober supermarket manager Mindy Mendoza (Jojo Brown), underscores how recovery may be an individual effort, but it can be fortified by a village of allies.
Sam has spurned friends and family, burning many a bridge because of her addiction to alcohol. The spiraling seemed to start when her father became terminally ill, and continued when he died.
The fact that her ex-best friend Brit (Compère) is now marrying her ex makes numbing all feelings look like the only option.
On the plus side, after two major incidents caused by her drinking, she has nowhere to go but up — unless she turns back to the bottle. (Or the water bottle filled with vodka that she used to bring to work, which explains why she now has a probation officer, played with a pitch-perfect sense of desperation and mischief by Madison Shepard.)
But Sam despairs when she is forced to leave New York altogether. She starts working at the supermarket back home in Malden, a Boston suburb, so she can pay her mother, Carol Fink, rent — the same mother who denies alcoholism is a disease. The two spar as they bristle at their new living arrangement.
Sheedy, who plays Carol, is an actor who knows a little something about coming-of-age stories.
“She’s such a giving performer,” Black-D’Elia says of the “Breakfast Club” and Brat Pack alum, now 58. “She’s very maternal. She sort of right away took me under her wing, and I felt very protected by her. She’s incredibly funny, very dedicated, really intelligent. I’ve been a fan of hers for as long as I can remember. So it was a real gift for me to be able to do this with her.”
Black-D’Elia, who lives in Brooklyn, says she was initially drawn to “Single Drunk Female” by the prospect of working with Konner and Headland, but also the narrative.
“I just thought that Simone did such a great job of writing a really specific story,” she says. “So it felt truthful. I found out later it was based on her life. It’s funny, and so I think there’s an easy access point to the story so that you’re maybe surprised by the more emotional moments and hopefully more invested than you would be in a typical half-hour comedy.”
Sam is 28 in the show when she starts measuring her time in days of sobriety.
When Finch was 28, the writer-producer, who grew up in Melrose, a town next to Malden in Massachusetts, was in recovery, too. As she got sober, her relationship with her own mother improved.
When it came time to cast Finch’s younger self, Black-D’Elia arrived as something of a revelation.
“The day that we saw her — she was the first one of the day — we all looked at each other and we said, ‘That’s her. That’s it,’” Finch says. “And from that day on, our lives have been much easier.”
“Samantha is such a hard role, I think,” she says. “It’s being empathetic while being annoying while getting sober while being hopeful. In one role, one of those things could encapsulate an actor. And she was able to play all of them kind of at the same time, which is insane.”
Though Black-D’Elia has had a string of other roles, she is known for her onscreen pairing with “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Kaitlin Olson in “The Mick,” a sometimes zany Fox sitcom that ran for two seasons before it was canceled in 2018.
She played Sabrina Pemberton, a rich kid in Greenwich, Connecticut who butts heads with her aunt Mickey (Olson), tasked with caring for Sabrina and her siblings after their mother (Mickey’s sister) flees the country following an arrest for fraud and tax evasion. Black-D’Elia’s chemistry with Olson was one of the show’s major attributes.
Olson’s character was not the typical guardian figure — something of a loose cannon, and not exactly one to turn down a drink. Sabrina scoffed at Mickey, but could secretly identify with her on some level. In many of the moments she shared with her aunt, it seemed like they were approximately the same age.
“Sam in some ways starts out as a character that we’ve seen a lot recently on television,” Black-D’Elia says of her new role on Freeform.
“She’s sort of stubborn and immature and sort of rough around the edges. And what I love most about the show is that that sort of quickly fades away, and she sheds that layer of skin and we see someone a little bit more truthful who still has that edge and still struggles with obviously many things in her life, but is also capable of joy and connection. Because that’s what getting sober does for a lot of people. It is my favorite thing about the show. I hope that people feel that when they watch it.”
Besides headlining “Single Drunk Female,” this year has brought quite a few milestones for Black-D’Elia.
In October, she got married to director Henry Joost (“Catfish,” “Project Power,” and the third and fourth installments of “Paranormal Activity”). She met him when they were working on “Viral,” a 2016 sci-fi film about a “worm flu” he helmed with directing partner Ariel Schulman. (Joost, 40, and Schulman direct an episode of the forthcoming “The Watcher” Netflix series based on the true story of the Westfield Watcher house.)
In December, Black-D’Elia turned 30.
She grew up in Clifton, the daughter of attorney Anthony D’Elia — currently a state superior court judge in Hudson County — and Elinor Black-D’Elia, who worked on magazines in the printing industry. Her brother Kyle Black-Smith, 35, works for an executive search firm.
She found her passion as a tween at Broadway Bound, a performing arts school in Lyndhurst (“You had to be a triple threat to get in, even as a kid,” her mother recalls). Black-D’Elia took dance instruction there as a young child, but connected with acting in the school’s musical theater class.
“It was so fun and so freeing, and I felt like I had finally found fellow weirdos,” she says.
Maureen Cavanaugh Kastl, director of Broadway Bound for 32 years, remembers Black-D’Elia starring as Helen of Troy in a show produced by the school.
“She was a natural actress,” she says. “Very dedicated, down-to-earth.”
Black-D’Elia began trying out at auditions and booked her first job — as Bailey Wells on the soap opera “All My Children” — when she was a senior at Clifton High School. The actor has since returned to Lyndhurst to talk to students at her old dance school.
“We went to her bat mitzvah,” Cavanaugh Kastl says. “What’s extraordinary about Sofia is she never forgot where she came from.”
That’s something Sofia’s mother is also quick to note.
“She is so proud to be from Jersey,” she says. “She’s proud of who she is.”
Elinor Black-D’Elia, who lives in Clifton, was there for the long ride as Sofia stuck with her passion through unpredictable auditions and callbacks.
“It was just something that was in her,” she says.
“She’s been lucky and she’s talented, but she works so incredibly hard ... She never really wanted to be a star. She just really wants to work.”
Sofia was accepted to Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, but attending the college would’ve meant not taking professional jobs during the school year without special consent (it’s the program’s policy). So at 17, she had to decide: Rutgers or a starring role in the MTV series “Skins,” an American adaptation of the popular British teen series (which filmed in Toronto).
“It was probably the hardest decision,” her mother says.
Sofia opted to pursue “Skins,” playing Tea Marvelli for one season. The series, which drew some criticism for its depiction of teen sex and drug use, was canceled in 2011. But she went on to build a resume of roles that would span comedy, drama and a big-budget film epic.
Black-D’Elia, who studied acting at New York’s William Esper Studio, was cast as Sage Spence in the last season of “Gossip Girl” in 2012 (before a sequel series premiered in 2021). Later, she played a domestic violence survivor who could heal people in the 2015 CW series “The Messengers” and had a role in the teen time travel film “Project Almanac.”
The actor also played Tirzah in the 2016 adaptation of “Ben-Hur,” directed by Timur Bekmambetov. The same year, she appeared as Andrea Cornish in the Emmy-winning HBO limited series “The Night Of,” starring Riz Ahmed and John Turturro.
“That was big,” her mother says. ”That really was a turning point in her career.”
After her sizable role in the main cast of “The Mick,” Black-D’Elia appeared in Showtime’s “Your Honor,” a nail-biter of a limited series (that has since been granted a second season) starring Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, which premiered in 2020 and came to its harrowing conclusion in 2021.
Black-D’Elia played a teacher in the show, based on the Israeli series “Kvodo.” Cranston took on a role that recalled her own family — that of a father and judge, though his posting was in New Orleans, where his character is caught in a particularly thorny moral morass involving his teen son.
Last year, Black-D’Elia had a part in the Netflix teen movie “To All the Boys: Always and Forever,” the film adaptation of Jenny Han’s 2017 novel “Always and Forever, Lara Jean” and the third film in the “To All the Boys” series.
Now that her daughter is leading the cast of “Single Drunk Female,” Elinor Black-D’Elia sees it as a chance for Sofia to break out in a bigger way.
“I really think this is her moment.”
Black-D’Elia filmed the “Single Drunk Female” pilot in Chicago and the series in Atlanta.
Just how did the actor prepare for playing someone coping with addiction?
“Like almost every everybody, there are a lot of people in my life that are in recovery, in AA and other types of recovery,” Black-D’Elia says. “I think addiction is something that we’re all sort of touched by in one way or another. And I was so lucky, because I had Simone there every single day. She was so open and so generous with me.
“I really wanted to not get ahead of myself, in terms of Sam’s sobriety journey. That was really important to me. I didn’t want to go to 10 meetings before we started shooting and read the book (aka the “Big Book” from Alcoholics Anonymous) and do all the things because Sam was so new to it. And so all of it felt like new information to her. I did my research as the journey went on and she progressed herself.”
Episodes of the show end with a website and phone number for substance abuse issues (findtreatment.gov; 1-800-662-HELP).
One other detail that Black-D’Elia was keen to nail down was the subtlety of Sam’s Boston-area accent — for good reason.
“I felt really strongly that her accent should come out when she was drunk,” she says. “My Jersey accent comes out a lot when I drink and a lot when I’m angry. I grew up in Jersey and then immediately moved to New York when I graduated high school. My father’s from Jersey City. My mom’s from Brooklyn — I have these really strong accents in my childhood. But then as you start to move away from it, you lose it over the years. And then it just comes out when you have no control over your body and your mind. So I did have a dialect coach for any scenes that Sam was drunk.”
The charming Lily Mae Harrington (”Room 104,″ “All Rise”), 28, who grew up on Cape Cod and makes excellent use of her time playing Felicia, uses a markedly more pronounced Massachusetts accent — the full Boston. It makes sense because her character stayed in Malden when Sam moved to New York.
“There’s nothing that I hate more than a bad Jersey accent on TV,” Black-D’Elia says. “And so I can only imagine how Bostonians feel because there’s so many bad Boston accents on TV and in film. It was really important to me that it was subtle even when she was drunk but that you heard little words here and there.”
“Single Drunk Female” premieres with back-to-back episodes 10 p.m. ET Thursday, Jan. 20 on Freeform. The show is available the next day on Hulu. After the premiere, the series moves to 10:30 p.m. ET Thursdays on Freeform.
Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
