In the aftermath of a disastrous birthday party, which saw her best friend’s husband have a heart attack, and her husband, Robert, nearly get shot, Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker) asks Robert (Thomas Haden Church) for a divorce. His response is to vomit into his wine glass, and then over the shoes of a police officer. Frances looks mildly annoyed, and turns, apologetically, to the cop. “I’m sorry – he had a lot of fondue.”
And so opens Divorce, HBO’s viscerally captivating new comedy by Sharon Horgan. Horgan is apparently building an empire of one-word-title sitcoms that take a domestic situation we think we’ve seen on TV before, and go fully forensic on it – Waking The Dead-style – so we get to see all the disgusting guts and fluids within.
In Catastrophe, she exploded the notion that motherhood somehow grants you wisdom or serenity. In Divorce, she explores what happens when you fall out of love, through indifference, and into hate, and the bit of the Venn diagram where those three overlap.
Because it’s Parker and HBO, everyone is rich and blow-dried, and it’s lovely to look at; because it’s Horgan, everyone is just enough of a broken monster you fall slightly in love with them. Tonally, it’s like a dream after eating a wheel of stilton and falling asleep in front of Sex and the City.
I have a soft spot for watching couples like Frances and Robert, relationships that feel like two people slowly eating each other with teaspoons. When your domestics are about dishwashers, toxic couples can be a sort of emotional tourism. They lie, cheat and scream at each other, and have all the feelings so you don’t have to.
Because cosiness is TV death. Carrie and Mr Big fought, fucked, philandered, and failed to ever be comfortable with each other. In contrast, the plot of Sex and the City 2 hinges on Carrie being grumpy that Mr Big has bought a TV for their bedroom.
As a child, I got hooked on the co-dependent nightmare romance between a narcissistic starlet and her hyperactive, emotionally withholding producer. Yes, Kermit and Miss Piggy were the prototype toxic couple – Piggy, like all great divas, leaked hunger (for food, fame, frogs, the world), in contrast to Kermit’s masculine professionalism (the show must go on, no matter the emotional cost). They had no weakness but each other. Smushed nose-to-cathode-ray, aged six I was certain that true love was karate chopping your amore in the face on national TV for doing a sex-look at Raquel Welch.
Soon after came Eastenders’ Den and Angie. Owners of the Queen Vic, their relationship was a booze-drenched battle royale of emotional cruelty and blue-mascara tears. When Ange found out Den was cheating, Angie did what any brass-ovaried badass would do, and told him she was dying of cancer (she wasn’t). Den discovered the truth, and retaliated on Christmas Day 1986 with a present – divorce papers. “’Appy Christmas, Ange!”
One of TV’s most rootable-for love affairs has a toxic underbelly. In the finale of Friends, Ross chased Rachel to the airport to stop her getting on a plane to Paris to take her dream job. Classic toxic boyfriend: “Shhh, you don’t need your career, babe, you’ve got me now …” We all applauded, before remembering they have a child together. Is baby Emma still in a Boeing on a JFK runway?
We love Olivia and Fitz in Scandal, Lucious and Cookie in Empire, Piper and Alex in Orange Is The New Black. Alex put Piper in jail, Piper nearly got Alex murdered, but they still they fight-fuck all over the library floor. But Piper resents that her carefully cultivated prison top dog persona doesn’t wash with her long-term love. We’ve all been there too, right? “Ungh, do you have to see and love me as I am? Can’t you see and love me as, I dunno, Lemmy from Motörhead? That’s kind of how I see myself.”
When I look down the sofa at the love of my life, sharer of my box sets, the person with whom I will devour Divorce with teas-on-laps and twin slankets, I consider that toxic TV couples provide a safe peephole into a dystopian future – yes, we may be happy beanbags now, but if the stakes were high enough, could we still enflame such passions in each other? Would you die for me? Kill for me? Fake cancer for me? Yes, Cara Mia, a thousand times. But it’s definitely not my turn to load the dishwasher.
