When I was a college admissions counselor, I had a little trick that I shared with prospective students to figure out which of the many, many colleges they were visiting was actually their favorite. I would ask so every time you leave a new school do you start to reflect on the pros and cons of that school? They would chuckle and say yes, of course. Then I would ask do you compare your campus visit experience to the other schools you visited? They would again say yes, duh (they wouldn’t say “duh” out loud but I knew they were thinking it). Then I would ask do you keep comparing every school against one school in particular? Then I would watch it dawn on them in real time that they were not quite as confused as they previously thought, and that there was a much more obvious front-runner in their seemingly endless search.
Someone recently asked me what my favorite TV show is, and after all the eye rolling and agonizing and the “Can you ever really have a favorite kind of ART????? What’s the benefit to declaring a FAVORITE anyway when they’re all so DIFFERENT?” I calmed down quite a bit and went back to my college admission brain and asked myself to locate the show that I think of whenever I am watching a new show. The show I wish that all other series were more like. The show that I think of randomly, the show that I have come to in low points and high points of my life to wrap around my brain like a weighted blanket, and the answer was so clear. It’s Catastrophe.
If you haven’t seen Catastrophe, I’m so excited for you to experience it. It’s on Amazon Prime, and it consists of four, six-episode seasons. Each episode is only 24 minutes long, so it is very easy to breeze through one season in a single setting. It is co-written and co-starred by Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan who play Rob and Sharon, the main couple of the series. The IMDb plot synopsis for the show is about as simple as it gets — “American boy Rob gets Irish girl Sharon pregnant while they hook up for a week while on a business trip to London” — but its simplicity is deceiving. Rob and Sharon ultimately decide to try and make their relationship work, which requires Rob to move to London and move in with Sharon. What ensues is of course, is not just one catastrophe, but many.
There is a LOT to enjoy about this show (Carrie Fisher! Domhnall Gleeson! Tobias Menzies!), but the true magic is the strength of its writing, and that’s what I want to focus on here. It’s so fucking well-written I can hardly stand it. Every single second is used perfectly without feeling too dense. The character development and world-building is incredibly tight; there is nothing there that doesn’t need to be there. The overall pacing and comedic timing is something that I consistently marvel at, and I don’t know of many other shows that have the ability to make you belly laugh and also cry and then laugh again within a single episode, sometimes a single scene.
This show does not pull punches or shy away from the deepest crevices of the human experience. If I had to try and encapsulate what it is about in a sentence, I would say that it explores the ethical realities of being human. It deals with sex, love, divorce, and infidelity. It deals with pregnancy and childbirth. It deals with addiction and recovery. It deals with aging parents, financial strain, workplace harassment, and adult friendships. And yet above all, this is a show with incredible compassion, humanity, and a strong sense of our collective modern ethos. Delaney and Horgan do not sugar coat anything, they are fully flawed characters who you root for and hate all within the same scene. I have never witnessed anything as magical as this in terms of character development. This show is vulnerable in places where other shows might crack a cheap joke or gloss over something. It has emotional weight, but doesn’t feel bogged down by sentimentality. It is incredibly special.
A scene from Catastrophe that always sticks in my mind is from the third episode of the second season. Rob and Sharon take a trip to Paris in order to prioritize their romantic relationship in the wake of the birth of their second child. The trip is….a mess. It’s one of those classic “We’ve built this up into meaning everything that it will end up meaning nothing” times that we have all witnessed at some point in our lives. Towards the end of the episode, they are sitting at a cafe, reflecting on the trip:
Sharon: You having a nice time?
Rob: Not really.
Sharon: I don’t think we’re holiday people.
Rob: How do you mean?
Sharon: Well, I just... I think we're good on a Tuesday, you know? When it's raining. Like, my favorite time in the last year was when we pretended my arms didn't work, remember? And you washed my hair and put that weird outfit on me.
Rob: Oh, my God. Yeah, that was the best.
Whenever I have an unexpectedly good time doing something random and fun, I always think “good on a Tuesday.” The older I get, the more I realize how often the big “exciting” events in your life can sometimes fall flat, but the smaller ones can offer such a burst of love and warmth when you need it the most. “Good on a Tuesday” has become a gentle reminder of exactly that.
What’s so unique, refreshing, endearing — and at times, frustrating — about Catastrophe is that it feels closer to reality than anything else on TV. If “reality television” as we’ve come to know it is the apotheosis of scripted, manufactured conflict for dramatic effect, then Catastrophe sits at the other end of that spectrum. It’s fiction, yes, but the emotional beat of this show comes from a place of true vulnerability. The chaos of Catastrophe always feels real, and that’s what makes it so magical and so comforting to watch.