Total Film

DIVORCE SEASON 1

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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

 ??  ?? Parker delivers the news that she’s got a Conchord to catch…
Parker delivers the news that she’s got a Conchord to catch…

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