Stacey & Joe: In Too Deep deserves a fairer portrait of Stacey

By Grace Kim

Joe Swash’s dream of a family lake business is a year behind schedule as Stacey & Joe: In Too Deep opens its third series. The unfinished project anchors a home life that the series presents as noisy, busy and unequal.

Series 3 finds Stacey Solomon caring for five children, 25 chickens, uncountable quail, a large house and a disabled dog. She also runs a hugely complicated, successful, busy and lucrative career.

Joe dreams of a fishing retreat he can pass to his children and of adopting an emu. The programme presents them as the nation’s noisiest celebrity couple, with Joe’s volume forcing everyone else to work harder to be heard.

The cockerel provides the exception. It is naturally loud, appears to hate Joe, and Joe is afraid of it. If the series turns that conflict into a choice of sides, its own comic logic favours the bird.

The lake is Joe’s main measure of failure. In the previous series, he imagined a fishing idyll surrounded by wildflowers and camping pods for visitors from far and wide; he now wants his children to inherit it. None of that exists yet.

Joe broke ground, a drought followed, and the two holes filled only after a wet January and February. Even so, the project remains a year late.

Stacey keeps telling Joe that he needs a business plan. He isn’t listening; instead, he scatters wildflower seeds and drives a tractor backwards into the lake. The mismatch between his loose approach and her demand for planning supplies the programme’s central joke.

Joe also wants Stacey to manage the project. Some of her contracts have ended, and she could take the job by setting aside projects of her own.

Her executive assistant, Emma, asks: “You’re going to work together? Is that you’re saying?” They then look at each other with expressions. A Celebrity Traitors Uncloaked-style spin-off could involve both women, or Emma alone.

The programme periodically moves to direct-to-camera interviews in a renovated barn beside the house. Its placement there appears to give the director some refuge from the chaos of Pickle Cottage.

In one such interview, Stacey explains: “Joe finds life easier when things aren’t planned,” and “I’m the polar opposite.” Joe has recently been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The diagnosis may at least help him and the wider family.

What should viewers take from the programme’s treatment of Stacey?

The practical answer is that competence and control are not the same. The series repeatedly calls Stacey bossy or controlling, or reaches for a synonym. Its jocular treatment of Joe, reinforced by the relaxed approach of his mother and sisters, suggests he has always received more latitude than Stacey.

That is how the programme reproduces a misogynistic trope (the familiar casting of a capable wife as a nag), while her husband remains the charming man with a million good ideas. The series presents Stacey as responsible, clever and ambitious, even as the person without whom nothing around her functions. It appreciates neither that competence nor her contribution, converting her work into a supporting role for Joe’s schemes.

The contrast becomes clearest once the lakes become viable for fish populations. Joe responds with glee, while Stacey recruits the man who accredited the lakes and mines him for knowledge about what to plant around them.

Her questions concern fish health and erosion, and her work turns his hazy vision into a functioning retreat. The sequence assigns invention to Joe and execution to Stacey, then treats the resulting imbalance as a joke.

None of this requires denying Joe’s qualities. The programme presents him as charming, fun and devoted to his children, without malice. It calls him a good man.

Those qualities explain the programme’s affection. They do not answer why its marital and sex inequalities remain acceptable when they cause real harm in real life.

Any further instalment would need to credit Stacey with the work that makes Joe’s ideas usable and stop presenting her management as an affront. Without that correction, the format keeps its audience inside the hierarchy it pretends to ridicule. The verdict remains: Team Stacey. And, if needs be, Team Cockerel.