DIVORCE SEASON 1
There’s something deliciously subversive about casting Sarah Jessica Parker in a TV series about a marriage imploding. After all, she spent six years of Sex And The City, plus countless cookie-cutter comedies, searching for Mr. Right. In Divorce, her fifty-something Frances has found somebody to swoon over – but it’s not her husband Robert (Thomas Haden Church). Cue tears, tantrums and one heck of a break-up.
“I want to save my life while I still care about it,” Frances says in episode one (of 10). That sort of emotional honesty is typical of series creator Sharon Horgan, star of other antiromcom series Catastrophe. Where that show is about a couple making it work despite the odds, Divorce is about a couple tearing strips from each other as they scrap over possessions, friendships and custody of their kids.
It provides a tart counterpoint to Horgan’s other work. This is on the darker side of funny-sad, but Parker
(sharp, glowering) and Church (baritone, infantile) are riveting as they excavate the humanity from Horgan’s painfully perceptive scripts. Whether it’s Frances and Robert hissing through therapy, or any act with the Other Man (Jemaine Clement, scene-stealing), it’s got wince-comedy in spades.
More grown-up than Girls, if not as incisor-sharp as Catastrophe, Horgan’s show provides a pointed, poignant examination of the inherent messiness of relationships – that the truth can hurt and be funny. Josh Winning