Bravo breaks mould with divorce dramedy
Girlfriends’ Guide is channel’s first original scripted series
LOS ANGELES — Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce is a sharply observed series about divorce, yes, but love and friendship and family as well.
Its premiere episode is funny and moving, sexy and sad, and very adult. But it’s nuance rather than crassness that rules — although the characters’ glossy affluence has the potential to rankle.
Girlfriends’ Guide can claim pioneer status as the first scripted series for Bravo (it appears on Slice in Canada), home of such flashily entertaining fare as the Real Housewives franchise, and the first series topped by Lisa Edelstein, who shines as woman-on-the-edge Abby McCarthy.
It also marks the auspicious bow of Marti Noxon as a solo series creator, following writing and producing stints on a range of hits including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy and another groundbreaker, Mad Men.
“We never wanted to go into scripted just to go into scripted,” said Lara Spotts, Bravo Media’s senior vicepresident in charge of development. Even as other reality-focused channels jumped on the scripted bandwagon, “We knew we had to wait for just the right project.”
Noxon and her hour-long series — which, at one point was in development for Showtime as a half-hour — turned out to be “the voice” that Bravo wanted, Spotts said.
“She’s talking about subjects that our reality characters are going through. She’s talking about things that our viewers are going through, but in a way that feels really fresh and unique,” Spotts said.
Loosely inspired by Vicki Iovine’s series of non-fiction guides to pregnancy and motherhood, the 13-episode Girlfriends’ Guide stars Edelstein as a successful how-to author whose upbeat depiction of her family life belies a disintegrating marriage to filmmaker Jake (Paul Adelstein, Private Practice).
Edelstein, the former House star with an impressive track record of playing supremely confident women, here, is vulnerable and sweetly affecting.
“I have never had an opportunity like this before in my life,” Edelstein said.
“It says something about where the world is. ... to be able to tell a story about this lively, sexual human being who’s in her 40s, that alone is something that wouldn’t have happened when I started in this business.”
Abby’s circle includes pals and divorce- war veterans Lyla (Janeane Garofalo) and Phoebe (Beau Garrett), and her brother Max (Patrick Huesinger). He’s a believer in marriage who achieved his dream of tying the same-sex knot with Ford (J. August Richards).
The characters are largely white, beautiful and, at the start, living the easy life in Los Angeles. Aside from Ford, who is African-American, and minorities included in later episodes, Noxon acknowledges it is a “WPP show,” shorthand for “white people problems.” Does she worry about backlash? “It’s a really difficult question and I saw Lena Dunham (the creator and star of Girls) struggle with it,” Noxon said. “The problem for me, and I think (Dunham) said something like this, is the best writing I can do is telling the things I know from my own experience.”
Comparisons have been made to Sex and the City, which Noxon calls flattering but not necessarily exact. Girlfriends’ Guide is a heartier mix of love, life and work, with money and job worries poised to intrude in a way they didn’t on the HBO series, she said.
On a fantasy scale, “I’d say our show is 10 feet off the ground and their show was 30 feet off the ground,” she said, laughing.