Sharon Horgan’s raunchy, relatable humor
You’ll find it in ‘Catastrophe’; look for more in ‘Divorce’
Catastrophe is one of TV’s filthiest, most brutally honest comedies — and Sharon Horgan wouldn’t have it any other way.
In the show’s six-episode second season, now on Amazon Prime, the Irish writer/actress plays the reluctant wife of an American advertising executive (Rob Delaney), who gets her pregnant during a weeklong sexcapade in London. While planning a third season of the British series, Horgan is also behind Sarah Jessica Parker’s return to HBO with dark comedy Divorce, due this fall.
Loosely inspired by Horgan and Delaney’s own lives (though both are married to other people), Ca
tastrophe follows the couple (also named Sharon and Rob) as they shag and spar about all manner of topics, including breast pumps, dwindling libido and raising their two kids (“You want your son’s penis to inspire respect, and a tiny bit of fear,” Rob says).
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation about reining anything in — we always sort of egg each other on,” says Horgan, 45.
But between jokes about untimely erections and old-lady bras, Catastrophe also gets more serious in Season 2 as Sharon grapples with postnatal depression and the possibility that she may have drunkenly cheated on Rob while they were briefly separated. The finale ends as Rob finds a receipt for a morning-after pill and decides whether to confront her about it.
Writing that episode, “we wanted to see her think, ‘I’m just gonna go out like I used to when I was single,’ almost as payback,” Horgan says. “What happened after — the terrible mistake she can’t remember — she thinks she’s dealt with. Just when she thinks she’s safe, we wanted to mess with our audience a bit.” While fans wait for Catastrophe’s still-undetermined third-season return, they can get another dose of Horgan’s humor in Divorce. The comedy hinges on a woman (Parker) in the midst of a messy split and was written by Horgan specifically for Parker, whose Sex ended its HBO run in 2004.
“It’s got an enormous emotional journey, and everyone was very keen to make sure we found the light and dark of that sort of situation,” Horgan says.
Divorce was born of conversations she and Parker had about the kinds of complex stories they want to see for women on TV, which has been a driving force in Horgan’s career ever since she moved to London in her early 20s to pursue acting. Frustrated with the types of roles she was being offered, she co-created and starred in BBC comedy Pulling, which centered on three single women and ran for two seasons.
“We set out to make something that allows women to be funny and not even spend any time dwelling on their gender,” she says. “It was an enormous opportunity for me to be in something where you get to say most of the funny lines, rather than the lovely female role who’s feeding lines to the very funny male character. It was great to reverse that.”