Kat is still standing at the front door when Season 5 picks up, which saves Trying from pretending two years off-screen have made the problem polite. Princess and Tyler’s biological mother has arrived, Princess already knows Nikki hid the truth about her, and Nikki is staring at a new family arrangement nobody had the foresight to put in the adoption paperwork.
Andy Wolton’s sitcom has spent years letting Nikki and Jason fight toward parenthood. Esther Smith and Rafe Spall’s characters survived infertility, the adoption process, home assessments, bureaucratic absurdities, and the terrifying discovery that raising children involves raising actual children. Season 5 changes the question. Nikki and Jason have the family they wanted. Now they have to work out who they are inside it.
Princess’s relationship with Kat supplies the immediate pressure. Scarlett Rayner plays her anger at Nikki with the sharpness of a teenager who has spotted an adult contradiction and plans to keep pressing until somebody cracks. Tyler reacts far less decisively, leaving Nikki and Jason unable to apply one tidy parental strategy to both siblings.
For Nikki, Kat possesses something she can never acquire through patience or love: the answers attached to Princess’s biological history. The season understands why this frightens her. Nikki spent years trying to become a mother, and suddenly motherhood feels like a position with an additional applicant. Somebody should really have warned her the interview process never ends.
Getting Normal Life Wrong
The comedy remains strongest when Nikki and Jason walk into a normal situation and immediately expose the small personal defect that makes normality impossible. Jason returns to education after Penny’s encouragement pushes him toward social work. His night out with younger students is beautifully calibrated around generational discomfort.
Jason expects something approaching his old idea of student nightlife and instead finds himself among cautious, health-conscious people whose choices make him look like an archaeological exhibit from the era of irresponsible lager. Spall rarely needs to oversell the joke. A baffled expression does the paperwork.
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Nikki’s new travel-industry job runs on similar comic friction. She wants to appear capable, composed, and professionally adult, which are three excellent reasons for Nikki to become catastrophically self-conscious. Smith understands the rhythm of embarrassment comedy. She lets Nikki realize she has made a mistake a fraction before everyone else does, giving us time to watch the panic arrive.
A theme-park trip turns Nikki’s refusal to admit she fears rollercoasters into an escalating exercise in doomed pride. The joke works because the show does not suddenly invent a fear for one episode. Nikki’s entire personality is built around announcing that everything is fine approximately twelve seconds before proving otherwise.
Then there is Tuscany. Nikki and Jason effectively going on holiday to Italy by mistake sounds like a sitcom premise discovered on a whiteboard after lunch, yet Trying gets considerable mileage from watching these two improvise through circumstances they barely understand. Wolton’s trick is to keep the ridiculous event attached to recognizable behavior. Jason adapts. Nikki worries about adapting correctly. Both make the situation worse.
Even John losing a battle with state-of-the-art kitchen cabinets fits the same comic principle. The machinery is simple. The person confronting it has decided this is now a matter of dignity. The cabinets, naturally, show no mercy.
Who Gets to Be a Mother?
Kat’s presence could have turned the season into a custody melodrama with strategic shouting in doorways. Wolton chooses the much nastier option: people behaving reasonably while still hurting one another.
Nikki’s fear grows as Princess and Kat become closer. Princess wants information about where she comes from, and Kat can give it to her without conducting research or asking permission. Nikki sees that connection forming and begins imagining her place in Princess’s life shrinking. Smith never plays these spirals as random hysteria. Watch how Nikki studies Princess during conversations about Kat. Her reactions often arrive before she speaks, the smile tightening while she calculates how worried she is allowed to appear.
Princess’s resentment has equally clear roots. Nikki withheld the truth surrounding her contact with Kat in Spain, believing protection justified secrecy. Princess sees an adult who demanded honesty from her and then quietly exempted herself. Teenagers have been building legal cases from weaker evidence for centuries.
Rayner is especially effective when Princess’s certainty slips. Her anger suggests she has worked out exactly who failed her; her quieter interactions reveal a girl with no idea what Kat’s return means for the family already raising her. Princess wants answers without wanting Nikki and Jason erased. The adults keep assuming those desires must compete.
Tyler’s less defined response helps the storyline avoid treating biological connection as a universal instinct. He does not follow Princess’s emotional timetable. Cooper Turner gives his uncertainty an awkward physical quality, particularly when Tyler’s attention drifts toward first love and the ordinary terrors of teenage messaging. His family history matters, but so does figuring out what to text a crush. Adolescence is rude enough to schedule both crises simultaneously.
Jason’s calmer response to Kat creates distance between him and Nikki. He is willing to let situations develop; Nikki wants to identify every possible disaster before breakfast. Earlier seasons used these differences to make them complementary. Here the same traits become liabilities. Jason’s calm can look like complacency to Nikki. Nikki’s vigilance can feel suffocating to Jason. Neither interpretation is entirely fair. That is usually where the interesting marriages live.
Marriage After the Happy Ending
Colin Morgan enters as Kerry, Nikki’s charming colleague, and the season immediately acquires the sort of romantic triangle that can make a long-running sitcom audience reach nervously for the remote.
Kerry works because Morgan does not play him as an approaching plot device wearing nice clothes. His exchanges with Nikki create a plausible ease, and Nikki’s crush grows from a recognizable place. For years, her adult identity has revolved around trying to have children, trying to adopt, then trying to become the mother Princess and Tyler need. Kerry meets her in a new workplace, away from those histories, and responds to the person standing in front of him. That attention lands.
Wolton is careful with Nikki’s attraction, including when later revelations complicate the triangle. The story never requires her marriage to Jason to become fraudulent overnight. Attraction and commitment are allowed to occupy the same episode without the script calling a solicitor. Television sometimes behaves as though one flirtatious conversation means a character has been secretly miserable since the pilot. Trying gives Nikki the less sensational problem of being happy and still capable of confusion.
Smith is terrific throughout these scenes. Nikki’s anxiety tends to accelerate verbally, yet Smith keeps finding small pauses where embarrassment or guilt catches up with her. She can make a spiral funny, then let one misplaced glance reveal why the joke has started hurting.
Spall faces a different challenge. Jason’s kindness has always seemed instinctive, and Season 5 tests what happens when instinct does not provide an immediate answer. His social-work training extends his desire to care for people into a career, while his home life becomes harder to read. Spall’s confused looks still land as jokes, particularly around his younger classmates, but his quieter parenting scenes give Jason a steadiness that never needs a grand speech.
Smith and Spall now have to play a couple who are settled and uncertain at once. Nikki and Jason reached the life that once defined every decision they made. Princess and Tyler are growing up. Jason is returning to education. Nikki has a new job and a colleague she cannot quite stop thinking about. Their shared goal has been replaced by separate movements. The old version of Trying asked if they could build a family together. Season 5 asks what happens when the builders finally take separate lunch breaks.
Everyone Is Trying at Something
The supporting cast has become smaller across the years, leaving Season 5 without some of the sprawling ensemble energy that once made almost every family gathering feel absurdly star-studded. The remaining characters compensate by acquiring problems with impressive specificity.
Karen reaches a breaking point with Scott while raising Stevie and attempting to develop a social life of her own. Siân Brooke gives Karen’s frustration real weight because she rarely plays her as permanently exhausted comic furniture. Karen wants friends. She wants space. She would presumably also like her husband to choose a hobby that does not require maritime rescue infrastructure. Scott, naturally, has tried to row across the Atlantic.
Darren Boyd’s performance remains one of the series’ great pieces of comic engineering. Scott is a poet, sculptor, singer, self-published author, and human warning against unmonitored enthusiasm. His Atlantic expedition fails, as anyone familiar with Scott might have predicted before the boat touched water.
Yet Boyd never treats failure as the punchline by itself. Scott’s endless projects carry a need to keep producing new versions of himself, and his disappointment has enough sadness to stop the character becoming a sketch-show guest who forgot to leave.
Phil Davis gets a similarly precise comic lane as Vic, whose handyman business becomes successful and therefore gives him a fresh reason to be annoyed. Vic reacts to good fortune with the suspicion of a man who assumes happiness has hidden fees. Davis can turn professional success into a personal inconvenience with little beyond a grunt.
Jason’s social-work path also brings Celia Imrie and Gbemisola Ikumelo into guest roles connected to a hoarder and the care system. These encounters matter because Jason is seeing support structures from a new position. Earlier seasons placed him and Nikki under institutional examination as prospective adoptive parents. Now he is learning what it means to be the person expected to enter somebody else’s chaotic life and offer useful help.
That reversal suits the series. People who once needed guidance eventually become qualified to give it, which is terrifying news for anyone who remembers how these people behaved in Season 1.
Five seasons in, Trying still finds its best jokes one inch away from genuine pain. A failed rowing expedition can expose Scott’s need for purpose. A crush can frighten Nikki because she loves Jason. Princess’s anger can exist beside her love for the parents who raised her. The season takes a little time to settle into this new stage of the family’s life, then remembers its oldest comic rule: everybody is doing their best, and everybody’s best could use supervision. Preferably by someone other than Scott.
The fifth season of the British comedy series premiered globally today, July 8, 2026, and is available to stream exclusively on Apple TV+. The story follows adoptive parents Nikki and Jason as they face unexpected family chaos when the biological mother of their children suddenly appears at their doorstep.
Where to Watch Trying Online
Full Credits
Title: Trying Season 5
Distributor: Apple TV+
Release date: July 8, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 30 minutes
Director: Ellie Heydon
Writers: Andy Wolton
Producers and Executive Producers: Josh Cole, Sam Pinnell, Chris Sussman, Andy Wolton, Esther Smith, Rafe Spall, Tim Whitby
Cast: Esther Smith, Rafe Spall, Scarlett Rayner, Cooper Turner, Sian Brooke, Darren Boyd, Charlotte Riley, Oliver Chris
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Arthur Mulhern
Editors: Mark Williams
Composer: Paul Saunderson
The Review
Trying Season 5
Trying Season 5 takes the dangerous sitcom step of giving its happy couple new problems and, mercifully, remembers they still have to be funny. Kat’s return, Nikki’s crush on Kerry, and Princess’s anger give Esther Smith and Rafe Spall richer material without turning Camden into EastEnders. A slightly uneven early stretch settles into sharp, affectionate television where Tuscany accidents, student nights out, and doomed Atlantic rowing trips carry real emotional consequences. Five seasons in, these people keep changing. Annoying of them, really.
PROS
- Smith and Spall’s superb chemistry
- Princess’s emotionally precise arc
- Affectionate, character-led comedy
- Mature marriage writing
- Scott remains gloriously ridiculous
CONS
- Slightly rocky early episodes
- Reduced supporting ensemble
- Some sweetness skirts sentimentality
