Divorce Season 1 Episode 1 Review

Divorce (2016-)

Season 1 Episode 1
Created by: Sharon Horgan
Starring: Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, Molly Shannon, Jemaine Clement
Rating: TV-MA

Plot
In this HBO show Robert (Thomas Haden Church) and Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker) decide to divorce.

Verdict
 The character aren't just unlikable, they're awful. The dark humor is rewarding, and Thomas Haden Church's humor is the one reason to watch one more episode. This could turn into a terrible game of one up-man-ship between husband and wife.
It depends.

Review
Robert delivers most of the humor. He's a bumbling dolt with some great one liners. In one of the first scenes, he's holding a plastic coffee tub and complaining to Frances that because she didn't let him in the bathroom he had to go to the garage and take a dump in the coffee tub. She rolls his eyes and he replies he didn't really do that, but the point is made.

Through the pilot none of the characters are likable. This episode touches upon lack of communication between friends and between spouses. Life changes and Molly Shannon and Sarah Jessica Parker's characters haven't adapted. They're still expecting their marriages to have the passion of a new relationship though they aren't doing anything to foster that. Their husbands aren't much better, instead content with a dysfunctional marriage. The first episode sets up the divorce between Robert and Frances.

She wants to divorce him after a friend of theirs has a heart attack. She realizes she no longer loves Robert. He's shocked and baffled, comically scaring her twice when he's quietly sitting in a room and Frances doesn't notice. He's against the divorce until he learns she's cheating on him. That actor is Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and the hilarious movie What We Do in the Shadows (2014).
Once he learns that, Robert is vindictive and at the end locks her out of the house, promising to turn the kids against her and make the divorce as painful as possible. This could turn into The War of the Roses (1989) with Michael Douglass and Kathleen Turner.