I've got a good one for you today. It's a comedy. But I'll warn you – it's ribald.
There seems to be a consensus right now that we are in a golden age of female comedy. There's a lot of it, for a start. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are worshipped. Broad City is getting rave reviews. And then there's Amy Schumer. If we are to believe the critical response, Schumer is the most important comedian on the planet.
Schumer is an era-defining feminist comedy hero, we're told, a woman whose take on our sexist society is both scabrous and true. All hail Amy Schumer.
Well, she has competition. One is Sharon Horgan, age 45 and Irish. Recently, Horgan's name began appearing in the TV trade press. See, Horgan's creation, a show called Divorce, is in development at HBO and is set to star Sarah Jessica Parker in her first TV series since Sex and the City. Most coverage included an obligatory, "Who they heck is Sharon Horgan?" angle.
Those who follow British comedy closely will know her as the creator and star of a short-lived BBC show, Pulling. A very dark, deadpan comedy about thirtysomething dating, it had a huge cult following.
Catastrophe (now streaming on shomi) is Horgan's most recent work and it's a doozy, a genuinely original, slightly demented comedy about a middle-aged couple coping with the woman's unexpected pregnancy. It is truly, blindingly hilarious. But, as I warned you, it is ribald beyond your wildest expectations.
It starts as charmingly irreverent. Horgan and Rob Delaney (who both write and star, and play "Sharon" and "Rob") have a fling. Both are singly, early 40s. He's an American on a business trip to London. She's a school teacher there. They click, have a lot of sex for six days before he returns to the U.S. Almost three months later, Sharon calls. She's pregnant. Rob returns to London.
At this point, the series deftly slides away from the territory of Knocked Up and becomes spectacularly unpredictable. For one thing, it is rooted in an everyday reality. There is sensitivity and the daft humour of the mundane. The Sharon character explains to a colleague that she's thinking about marrying this Rob guy who got her pregnant. The colleague, a woman, laughs. "What? If I got married every time I got pregnant … know what I mean?" she scoffs.
Sharon's best friend, whom she doesn't really like, is thrilled. The tension between them is beautifully underplayed and utterly authentic. Like most people in their 40s, Sharon has friends who have changed, morphed into a grown-up version of lovable youth and become much less lovable but are still friends. Rob's one friend in London is a joke-a-minute annoyance, just a shade shy of being a jerk.
What happens, in essence, is that Rob and Sharon recognize what they like about each other and form a bond against this wacky, irritating world they exist inside. This is a love story, but one without any straining for obvious romance or pretense at deep feeling. It's not cynical; it's grounded.
You could call Catastrophe a rom-com that's raw. Its coarseness feels organic, anchored in a life lived, and not experienced through sitcoms and the Disneyfied version of romance that saturates most Hollywood rom-coms. The humour can be breathtakingly rude, but it's grown-up rudeness.
In truth, though, it is indefinable. Airing on Channel 4 in Britain, it has garnered ecstatic reviews and Horgan's been positioned as a cutting-edge feminist comic. Interestingly, it's a label she rejects. A profile of her done for The Daily Telegraph recently contained an interesting bit of drama. When Horgan was asked by the writer if she considers this to be the golden age for women writing and performing comedy, she responded: "'Women's comedy' has never felt like a thing for me in terms of what I watch, read or write. Something's either funny or it's not. You can put an end to this now. That's the last time I answer that f––– question."
Fair enough. There's a lot of swearing in Catastrophe. Casual, blithe swearing of the kind not meant to shock but to establish realism. And what Horgan does leans further into reality than what Amy Schumer, for all her merits, has achieved.
Watch Catastrophe. It will take your breath away. You've been warned about the ribaldry.
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