Some methadone for an expected Sharon Horgan withdrawal

My wife and I finished the four-season run of Catastrophe over the weekend. If you aren't familiar with it, it's the show created by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, about an American businessman who gets an Irish schoolteacher pregnant on a business trip to London, where she lives. He decides to upend his life in the U.S. and start one in England, with hilariously disastrous (but sometimes wonderful) results.

It's a brilliant piece of 30-minute comedy with a teasingly small quantity of episodes, only 24 in total, but that's how they do television in England -- never wanting to let a good idea overstay its welcome. We logically would have finished it a couple years ago (the final season aired in 2019), but we initially took a break due its lack of availability in an easy form, or possibly took a natural break between seasons and forgot to pick it up again. We've watched the last two in the last six weeks, prompted by my picking up the fourth season at the library, thinking that was the one we were on. When it turns out we hadn't actually seen the third -- a fact we discovered when we saw the big ending of season three revealed in the "previously on" before the start of the fourth -- we had to scramble and find the third season available for purchase online. So we knew where the third season was headed the whole time we watched it, but what are you going to do.

I'll get to what I want to talk about today in just a moment. But first, just thought I should give a shout out to The Last Man on Earth, which we also watched in the past few months under almost these exact same circumstances -- got stopped at some point, and picked back up with about two seasons left to go. The difference here is that each season is 18 episodes (and we felt the length sometimes), and they stopped at the end of season four not by choice, but by cancellation. That sums up the differences between American and British TV right there. Still, would love to see a treatment online of where they planned to take that show in season five and beyond. It was sort of a race to the finish for both shows, as Last Man was expiring from its availability on the streaming cousin of one of the local TV stations on June 30th, and Catastrophe was due back at the library.

In addition to all the other caustic and witty things it does right, Catastrophe resonated with me because it's about an American who moves from his own country to live in the foreign land where his wife lives. In my case my wife grew up here in Australia, though Horgan's Sharon is herself an immigrant of sorts in London, if not nearly so far or so different in mindset than the one Rob experiences. My wife and I got laughs -- and occasionally cringes -- every time there was a moment that had echoes of our own experience. 

In both TV shows -- but Catastrophe is the one I really want to talk about today -- we're really going to miss the characters we came to love over these four seasons. Although I enjoy Rob Delaney, who you might know as the normal guy who tries to become a superhero with disastrous results in Deadpool 2, it's Sharon Horgan I will really miss. Not only is she a great comedic talent, but I became kind of obsessed with her perfect mouth. Shhh, don't tell anyone, but check it out to judge for yourself:

Sorry, that's the best I can do in a single image. The phenomenon presents itself much more definitively when she's speaking.

Anyway, this is all a long way of telling you I had some immediate help in my expected Sharon Horgan withdrawal, at the time when the symptoms are always the worst.

On Monday night I watched a screener of Dating Amber, a 2020 Irish film that is just getting its Australian release this week. I haven't written my review yet, but check to the right when you read this, and you'll get my full thoughts on the film. (Or, if you are reading this at some time in the distant future, you can find it here.) 

Part of the reason I chose this from the several screeners per week sent to me by PR people was because of Horgan. She's not in it a huge amount, as she plays the mother of one of the two teenage leads, but what there is of her is *chef's kiss* "Magnifique!"

See the thing I've always loved about Horgan is her spitfire exasperation. She gives as good as she gets, and she's always giving. It may be a stereotype about Irish people -- but if so, it's a positive one in my mind -- that they are always stringing together a withering succession of putdowns and wry observations about the world, which frequently include words like "fecking" and "arsehole." Horgan is awesome at that.

However I also find her extremely sympathetic, and no, it's not just the mouth. There's something at her core that's sweet and nurturing, she's just not so precious as to forefront it. Her love is tough and sarcastic, but it shines through. 

Those qualities are present in Dating Amber, where her teenage son is trying to hide from the world that he's gay. The story mostly focuses on his interactions with other teenagers, who are onto him, though he starts dating a fellow closeted homosexual, the Amber of the title, to throw everyone off the scent -- which actually works, for a while. Horgan -- who is also a bit thick about this, probably because she's in denial -- is the one who discovers his drawings of large cocks in a notebook he's thrown in a bin. "Right," she says with a kind of distant look on her face, as though this explains the thing that's been plain as day if only she had been willing to acknowledge it.

Her scenes in the film involve sparring with her husband, which showcase her spitfire exasperation, and trying to comfort her son without letting on that she knows his secret, which showcase her nurturing. The perfect Sharon Horgan experience for a man necessarily weaning himself off of Catastrophe.

Oh, and I really liked the film. As I said, go seek out that review if you want to know more.

I only wish Dating Amber came along a few weeks later, when I really had the chance to be missing her. Since it opens this week, I had to watch it the very next day after finishing Catastrophe in order to write my review. I guess that's how these things go. Better now than not at all, I suppose. 

And "not at all" is the thing I really worry about when it comes to Horgan. She's already 50 years old -- she turns 51 a week from today -- and I wonder just how much longer she'll keep getting cast. Her undeniable talents as both a writer and performer should keep her working for some time, you would hope, and she's still got her looks. (Even saying that is bad, but I'm stepping into the shoes of a ruthless casting director in order to make that assessment.) But the working history of women over 50 in the entertainment industry is not a glorious one, so I have my concerns. 

I'd say I wish I'd discovered Horgan earlier than when she was already in her mid-40s, so there'd be more Horgan material to go back and watch. And in fact, she does have a scant few appearances in the first ten years of her career before Catastrophe started in 2015. (She's also in Game Night and a few other prominent films since Catastrophe started.) But one of the reasons she and Delaney started Catastrophe was so they could kick-start their careers and make people notice them. She wasn't really there fore me to discover before then, and unfortunately, the whole world missed out on what could have been years of delicious Sharon Horgan performances. 

And the reality is, if Horgan had had the career someone with her talents deserved, maybe she wouldn't have had such a great showcase for her skills as Catastrophe, and maybe I wouldn't have been exposed to her in a way that would allow me to appreciate her the way I do. Let's take whatever Horgan we can still get -- even in films like Dating Amber, where she plays a supporting role -- and hope that we keep getting it for some time to come, in ways that defy the entertainment industry odds.