Suppose it had to happen:
Of course, all the men are assholes, incompetents and low life cheaters, but the women are hard working bread winners (side note - if more women really are the bread winners and men are losers who don't make any money, when can we see a concomitant adjustment to the divorce laws? Yeah, that's what I thought....but I digress.)
They even got veteran penis hater Janean Garofolo to pretend to be heterosexual for a role as an embittered ex wife. Honestly, I expect this and don't lose much sleep over yet another hamster-feeder show, but I can't help wondering what a similar show from a guy's perspective would be like. Never mind the fact it would never get funded, it would definitely have an audience.
Quote:Quote:
“Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce”
Starts Tuesday, Dec. 2, at 10 p.m. on Bravo
In Bravo’s first scripted series, wives are the breadwinners and they earn a lot. Husbands, former and current, are on the take, and the only visible believer that marriage can work out is a newly married gay man. He’s the relentlessly earnest brother of the heroine, Abby, a highly successful self-help author and family guru who falls on dark times when she discovers that her husband has taken up with a nubile young TV star. It takes time to grasp that there is—beneath this fevered, determinedly outrageous comedy about couples who are split up or about to be, their advisers, the malignant plots and counterplots that ensue—a seductive dramatic core.
It helps that the lead characters seem, from the beginning, perfectly cast—Abby is portrayed by Lisa Edelstein (“House”); her wandering, not very successful husband, Jake, by Paul Adelstein (“Private Practice”)—and that impression grows steadily into conviction. Abby is surrounded by female friends ready to guide her through her predicament, most of them sharks—Janeane Garofalo portrays Lyla, newly divorced from a loser with a fetish for sexual subjugation. In contrast to her circle, Abby is warmhearted, lacking in bitterness, and also in self-interest, at least of a professional kind, a role Ms. Edelstein carries off with wonderful persuasiveness. A quality that even gets her through the scene in which Abby, encouraged by helpful friends, goes off to find intimacy as an about-to-be newly single woman, and finds it in the arms of an accommodating younger male she meets at a club. In the annals of television history there has never been a scene about a newly single woman out to discover who she really is sexually and otherwise that wasn’t packed with cringe-inducing dialogue, and this scene was no exception.
But things progress. At an important bookstore event for her latest work on family happiness, Abby holds forth, to a shocked audience of her fans, on her hopeless feelings about marriage and how she couldn’t help thinking how much easier it would be if her husband were dead.
This killer performance—one of the opening episode’s more hilariously effective scenes—comes in response to her husband’s treachery, her realization that her marriage hasn’t been working for some time, not in the marital bed at any rate. Still, as the script, by series creator Marti Noxon, makes increasingly clear, Abby isn’t quite ready to give up on this husband or their marriage, and neither is he quite ready to end things. Mr. Adelstein’s Jake is, unlike other feckless husbands introduced here, a serious presence, appealingly wry as he juggles the responsibilities of a father and husband, and those he owes to his decades-younger lover. Supported by his wife, he intended to work in films, become a director, a fruitless effort thus far.
He’s not alone in such an arrangement. Lyla’s husband, Dan (Michael Weaver), seems to have developed a taste for humiliation—he ran up high fees for his dominatrix, as Lyla bitterly complains—because of his failure to achieve success as a chef.
Before Abby’s fall from grace in the publishing world, she lunches with a book publicist who demands to know why Jake can’t take part in a publicity event.
“He’s prepping an indie he’s planning to direct,” explains Abby.
“So is the waiter,” comes the retort.
It’s characteristic of the show’s tone—knowing, hard, snappy. The series is set in sunny Los Angeles (shot in Vancouver), full of gleaming interiors and dark-hearted ambitions. It isn’t short of raunchiness, either, or sexual encounters—though none, it should be said, remotely as endless-seeming as those of Showtime’s far loftier-toned “The Affair.” “The Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce” (inspired by the “Girlfriends’ Guide” book series) is about a lot more than divorce. It is, along with the raunch, the flinty outlook, the “War of the Roses” echoes, and the fun, also about the pull of marriage. Thanks to the aforementioned fine performances, it’s a guide that entices.
Of course, all the men are assholes, incompetents and low life cheaters, but the women are hard working bread winners (side note - if more women really are the bread winners and men are losers who don't make any money, when can we see a concomitant adjustment to the divorce laws? Yeah, that's what I thought....but I digress.)
They even got veteran penis hater Janean Garofolo to pretend to be heterosexual for a role as an embittered ex wife. Honestly, I expect this and don't lose much sleep over yet another hamster-feeder show, but I can't help wondering what a similar show from a guy's perspective would be like. Never mind the fact it would never get funded, it would definitely have an audience.
