THE REIMAGINING OF A RELATIONSHIP
Sarah Jessica Parker leaves single life behind in her new HBO comedy Divorce
In August 2000, a Time NEW YORK magazine cover story touting singles life displayed Sarah Jessica Parker and her three Sex and the City co-stars with the headline: “Who Needs a Husband?”
That question could apply to Parker’s new HBO comedy, a piercingly honest yet droll exploration of a marriage on the rocks titled Divorce.
Premiering Sunday, Divorce returns Parker to series TV in a role that will inevitably be judged against her Sex and the City portrayal as self-described “sexual anthropologist” Carrie Bradshaw.
But, odds are, only fleetingly. Divorce reintroduces the actress as Frances, a suburban wife and mother gazing into the bathroom mirror in the series’ first scene as if to wish away encroaching signs of age, whereupon husband Robert (co-star Thomas Haden Church) interrupts to beef about how Frances hogs the bathroom.
Then, his back turned to exit, Frances, fuming, flips him a bird. With that fed-up move, Parker leaves Carrie Bradshaw far behind.
“I just improvised that,” says Parker. “I’m so glad they used it!”
But make no mistake, very little about Divorce wasn’t carefully thought out, if you believe Parker.
She says she and producing partner Alison Benson spent four years crafting the show’s concept while recruiting other off-screen talent that includes series creator Sharon Horgan (star and creator of the dark romantic comedy Catastrophe on Amazon Prime) and showrunner Paul Simms (whose credits include The Larry Sanders Show, Flight of the Conchords and Girls).
Then they mobilized a supporting cast including Molly Shannon, Talia Balsam and Tracy Letts.
It all adds up to a project Parker was, well, married to — and not as an acting showcase for herself; at first, she had no plans to appear in it. What made it so important to her?
“A lot of people I knew were at a very interesting point in their relationship,” she says. “It’s a reckoning of where we are, versus where we thought we would be, with people contemplating affairs, having affairs, surviving affairs or with marriages destroyed. I knew women who came out of divorces feeling triumphant, and others who felt it wasn’t at all like they thought the liberation would be.”
True, Parker, 51, has been wed for two decades to actor Matthew Broderick.
“But even if you’re not experiencing it, divorce is swirling around us all,” she says. “I felt strongly that this story should be told because it’s so many people’s story.”
Frances and Robert are a middleaged, middle-class couple with two children living in New York’s Westchester County. Their marriage is sputtering yet stuck in place. Then a seismic event thrusts divorce into the picture.
Fortunately for the audience, if not for this couple, there’s no easy or quick resolution in sight, despite the series’ blunt title.
Divorce for Frances and Robert, as for others in their social circle, can inflict itself as a protracted condition. This would be a good time to mention that Divorce, while weighty, isn’t Bergmanesque, nor is it Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? With sufficient frequency, the prism of Divorce refracts its all-too-familiar truths into well-earned laughs. (“I am divorcing you,” Frances tells Robert in desperation. “I just got to get the kids to school first.”)
“I watch S.J.,” says her co-star Church (Sideways, Spider-Man 3), “and she’s so brilliant in her nuance and navigation of the dramatic and the comedic.” That goes for Church, too. “Comedy and drama, I don’t prepare for them any different,” says Church. “I just want to make it as believable as possible, with always a sense of unknowing for the character: ‘What the hell is going to happen next?’ Just trying to keep it all honest. But hidden.”
Parker describes this marriage as one of “bitterness and resentment wrapped up in their very being. Frances brings divorce up by saying, ‘I want to save my life while I still care about it.’ That’s it! That’s the reason the show exists.”
Clearly, this is not the fraught yet frothy world of a single girl in pre9/11 New York City.
Frances, with 20 years of marriage under her belt, is older, sadder, wiser. Was Parker’s decision to claim as her own the Frances role a way to purge herself of her Carrie Bradshaw past?
“I don’t want to be done with that association,” she says. “I loved it! But I’m an actor. I always was, and now my job is to share who Frances is with the audience.”
I felt strongly that this story should be told because it’s so many people’s story.