BACK FOR THIRDS
New season for quirky ‘Catastrophe’
‘CATASTROPHE” has rightly earned its hype by reinvigorating the romantic-comedy genre with the whip-smart writing and chemistry of its creators/stars, Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan.
But its third season, which has its US premiere Friday on Amazon, is notable for a more somber reason: it’s the last project Carrie Fisher filmed before she died in December.
The “Star Wars” actress appeared as Rob Norris’ (Delaney) mother Mia in five episodes, popping in to disapprove of her son’s choice to move to London and marry Sharon (Horgan) after he impregnates her, and to drive her new Irish daughter-in-law crazy. Fisher was returning from the series’ London shoot when she had a heart attack mid-flight, and died in LA four days later.
“She delivered an amazing performance, top to bottom, and we had a wonderful time with her over the course of a couple weeks,” Delaney, 40, says. “We didn’t do anything [to the show after she died] other than edit it to the best way to serve the story and her performance. We didn’t change anything.”
Delaney, a married father of three boys under the age of six, who made a name for himself as a comedian on Twitter, said the 60-year-old Fisher was also a source of life advice. “She was a wonderful example that you can have success in Hollywood and be kind and sensitive and generous,” he says. “[That] those things don’t preclude you from working in entertainment, and that’s really nice to see in practice. It takes just as much time to be a jerk as it does to be nice, so why not be nice?”
Seasonon 3 of“Catastrophe” a strophe” picks up exactly where it left off, with Rob sitting on the couch next to his wife, slack-jawed, after discovering an unexplained receipt for the morning-after pill. Sharon, who can’t remember what happened in the drunken hook-up she had with a stranger while fighting with Rob, is trying to keep the indiscretion hidden from her husband.
“It doesn’t make sense to him. Why would there be a morning-after pill that he wouldn’t know about? Why wouldn’t she send him to the store herself to go get it? It doesn’t really jibe with the way that they have their discourse,” Delaney says. “So he’s nervous.”
With their characters more at odds than they’ve been previously, Delaney and Horgan, who cowrite all six episodes, had to find humor in places other than their usual witty rapport. For Rob, still unemployed after last season’s sexual-harassment misunderstanding, that means a series of disastrous job interviews. On the homefront, their three-yearold son has developed a charming habit of biting his classmates — and of course, there’s Brexit.
While Delaney has been vocal about his political opinions on Twitter — and there’s a joke about the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and new US President Donald Trump in the first episode — “Catastrophe” is keeping its story focused on domestic issues.
“Those things are so huge that it might have been weird not to mention them,” he says. “But we’re only using them as things to create a more stressful environment for Sharon and Rob. Of course, we have strong, passionate feelings about that stuff in real life, but on the show we’re not trying to grind that particular ax.”
“In eachh episode there’s something thrilling about that golden age of scientific expansion. The invent tion of the light bulb. X-rays being discovered. Madame and Pierre Curie. Einstein ... is sort t of the strange, twinkling, congenial, brilliant clown that just walks you through.” — Geoffrey Rush, who plays Albert Einstein in “Genius” on National Geographic