100 Favorite Shows: #73 — Catastrophe
“I’ve never actually liked anyone enough to have a baby with them.”
While on a business trip to London, American ad man Rob Norris (Rob Delaney) hooks up with British teacher Sharon Morris (Sharon Horgan) and she inadvertently winds up pregnant. From there, Catastrophe is off and sprinting, as Rob relocates from Boston to London to find a new job while he and Sharon, newly married, prepare to raise their son together. It’s a simple, Richard Curtis-type premise (turned highly sardonic) that was developed by Delaney and Horgan in 2014 for the U.K.’s Channel 4. Following this creation, Catastrophe became a much more caustic depiction of a rom-com, showcasing two people who vacillated frequently between love and hate for one another. After partnering with Amazon to bring Catastrophe to the States, Delaney and Horgan concluded the four-season run with a finale in February 2019.
(It would be a catastrophe if you read this essay and spoiled Catastrophe for yourself. Therefore, you should know that spoilers for Catastrophe are found within.)
Every two months or so, social media is set ablaze when a user asks the common question, “When did you realize you were an adult?” For many, this is typically answered with bills coming in the mail or self-control-devoid, mozzarella stick-laden grocery store trips. For me, it was not just when I laughed at the adult-oriented jokes of Channel 4 and Amazon’s Catastrophe, but when I was able to share in that laughter with a middle school teacher I was visiting when I came back to my hometown. This was a clear signal that things had changed. Catastrophe was a show about adults and it was made for adults; I just happened to belong to that audience while it was airing, rather than arriving to the series later.
Since Catastrophe was an adult comedy, the characters — namely Rob and Sharon — faced plenty of concerns that were solely reserved for older people. In season one’s “Episode 5,” the episode begins with Rob and Sharon relishing in their cynicism for the greater British community they’re enveloped in, as they remark about how much they love watching young people argue. As Catastrophe was always exceedingly honest, Sharon is quick to point out that they argue in similarly vitriolic tones. It’s Rob who tells himself that what they argue about is actually worth arguing about and young people just don’t understand.
On the one hand, he has a point. Sharon and Rob found each after some seriously troubling moments in past relationships. Sharon has grappled with suicidal ex-lovers. Rob once endured a miscarriage with a woman he felt guilty about not truly loving. As the parents of Jeffrey (Kai Alexander), Rob and Sharon are expected, by their son, to be the warm center of a nuclear family where he can experience a normal, wholesome childhood. But before Jeffrey was a part of their lives, their own experiences were distinctly abnormal and devoid of anything resembling wholesomeness. That baggage is always a part of a family because parents go through so much shit that kids just don’t know about. Rob is not reframing insecurities to portray himself as superior to the young couple; he’s speaking from a genuine, veteran perspective. Barring an unspeakable tragedy, the arguments of young lovers just can’t compare.
Most of the time, relationship-based arguments wouldn’t be a source of competition, but Rob and Sharon are extremely self-centered and determined to be better than the people they scoff at in daily life. Their recognition of an arguing young couple isn’t out of pity or empathy; it’s out of the satisfaction that other couples are imperfect, too.
The aforementioned life experiences of Rob and Sharon underscore the sense of morbidity in love. The two of them are cynical and jaded, mean and foul-mouthed. (Regarding her fake-nice friend, Fran (Ashley Jensen), Sharon complains, “I wish sometimes her dad would get caught with child porn, just to knock the smug out of her.”) There’s true hatred for the world around them coursing through their souls and they struggle to pack it away when they’re around Jeffrey, who’s often privy to a number of fraught situations in which his parents find themselves embroiled. (They’re even desensitized to a number of these, as evidenced by Rob instantly following up a demure, “Oh no” with a peppy, “That’s great!” after he learns that Sharon was promoted, but only because another teacher committed suicide.)
The toxicity of their personalities comes, in large part, from the sense that both Rob and Sharon are past the point of caring in their lives. Whatever childhood dreams of a fairytale wedding and a “happily ever after” marriage they might have had are, by the series’ outset, eroded from decades of depression and bitterness. By the time they link up in London and make the call to get married for the sake of their son, neither are interested in having a celebratory ceremony anymore. As Sharon observes, she only has a small group of friends she doesn’t like very much and Rob has just one friend. Therefore, instead of a wedding, they agree to attend the obligatory, abbreviated, legal ceremony and then take a cab to T.G.I. Friday’s. (Sharon tells Rob he can finger her on the way — he’s content with it.)
Since they’re in their forties, marriage is just an obstacle to the genuine concerns Rob and Sharon have to deal with as a child is on the way. Financial obligations, for example, don’t pause themselves so Rob and Sharon can have a day that celebrates life. Instead, marriage becomes a practicality as the two focus more on finding work that will provide for their family (primarily) and fulfill their spirits (secondarily). Most of the time, the issue of who will actually bring in the cash for the family becomes a source of argument for the pair. (Most of Rob’s interviews go awry, as well. The best is when he meets Dan (Domhnall Gleeson, dialing up a David Brent-esque persona) and the conversation is mostly about a prior applicant with an eyepatch.)
Both Rob and Sharon want to be the ones to work, partly as a matter of pride and partly because it would make issues of childcare much simpler for the two of them. Of course, they’re not necessarily the best communicators and these arguments result in them blowing up at one another. Frequently, their quarrels are grounded in a foundation of their intense similarities to one another (Rob hates himself and sees a lot of himself in Sharon, so he often acts like he hates Sharon — and vice versa). Though, while they can certainly veer into vulgar vernacular, my favorite arguments are the ones that juxtapose Rob Delaney’s goofy, down-home, “Dad Bod come to life” persona against horrible, Armando Ianucci-level insults. My personal favorite is:
Rob: “Is your e-mail address still ImpatientShithead@Mean.jerk?”
Sharon: “Yeah. Yeah, it is. Is yours still FatIdiot@BadBreath.cunt?”
In moments like these, it hardly seems that Rob and Sharon actually like each other. (No one can slam “cunt” down on television like Horgan, who seems to delight in it, does.) At first, their sexual dynamic was hot and cruel and filled with chemistry and their interpersonal relationship was charming and occasionally dotted with sweetness. By season three’s “Episode 2,” though, there’s hardly any sexuality left between the two. Following Jeffrey’s birth, Rob is plagued by random bouts of sweating, fewer compliments about his hairless back, and the resignation to jerking off in the basement before going to bed.
The sense of losing an adventurous spirit after having a child together is palpable throughout Catastrophe as the massive problems of the series shift from Rob trying to make a long-distance job work across the pond to Rob reckoning with reckless behavior (drunk driving is his rock bottom as he breaks his own sobriety, another play on Delaney’s real life persona) that impacts more than just himself now. Yes, they’re jealous when Sharon’s brother, Fergal (Jonathan Forbes), moves to Spain, but they don’t yet realize that they’re not allowed to act on self-centered fantasies when their child is the obligation. Or, if they do realize, they’re not selfless enough to let those fantasies go.
Ultimately, though, (at least in the third “Episode 2”) Rob and Sharon make amends over their bewilderment at actually possessing a restaurant-quality blender. It’s another sign of adulthood, but it’s also a testament to the fact that, against the odds, they’ve managed to make some semblance of a home life possible for one another. In that awed, blender-based moment, domesticity is enough.
When the series wound to its conclusion, it bore the unenviable task of resolving the character arc of Mia (Carrie Fisher), Rob’s mother, without having access to Fisher’s talents, after she sadly passed away before Catastrophe concluded. (Delaney and Horgan managed to end Mia’s arc in the series finale by writing her death offscreen and then closing her dialogue out with a blunt e-mail she wrote advocating for people with disabilities. It’s quite fitting.)
However, it also bore the task of putting an end to a relationship between Rob and Sharon. When two people who crossed into each other’s lives like they did, the connection can never truly end — even if they did break up by the denouement of the series finale. To me, it’s still a bit unclear how the final scene of Catastrophe is meant to make us rethink the series that came before the fourth “Episode 6.” There’s a pervasive feeling of Kate Chopin-esque tragedy as Rob and Sharon swim out into the ocean together, but I’m not inclined to think that they’re the kind of people who would kill themselves over an impending break-up. I’m also not sure that they did break up, what with Sharon’s second pregnancy announcement in the series’ final moments. And yet, they hardly seem to be the type of couple that would actually find renewal and redemption in the salt water.
No matter what path Rob and Sharon chose at the end of Catastrophe, though, they were smiling to be in one another’s presence. Break-up, death, a happily ever after? Maybe none of these outcomes are the future of their coupling. After all, neither could have never guessed that they’d be one another’s future after just one fling in London. I might feel inclined to think that they’re “the ones” for each other, but how should I know the truth? Rob and Sharon know best; there’s someone for everyone.
