Should You Try To Make It Work With Girlfriends' Guide To Divorce?

What Is This Thing?

Abby McCarthy is the mega-bestselling author of the Girlfriends' Guide To self-help books. But her latest volume -- which promises to teach readers "how to love your husband and your family without losing your mind -- arrives just in time for her marriage to implode. Can she maintain her literary career if the whole basis she's built it on is falling apart? Also there's the whole thing where breaking up her marriage and hurting her kids makes her sad and stuff.

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 10 PM on Bravo.

Why Was It Made Now?

Someone at the network may have the foresight to realize that TV trends are cyclical, and that since audiences may eventually tire of watching real rich fuckups, maybe it's worth exploring a show that covers fictional ones?

What's Its Pedigree?

Series creator Marti Noxon is best known for her...um...polarizing work on Buffy The Vampire Slayer (hated Spuffy? That's her), but she's also written on girl shows like Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, and Glee, and the unisex show Mad Men. Among the stars are House alumna Lisa Edelstein as Abby; Paul Adelstein (Scandal's Leo) as her husband, Jake; and Janeane Garofalo as her divorce-lawyer friend Lyla.

...And?

I've only seen the pilot, but for a pilot, it is remarkably un-pilot-y: the characters, their work/family situations, and their relationships to one another are all established in ways that feel natural, not clumsy or contrived. (Extra points for introducing Abby's brother Max without making him call her "sis" like no one in real life does ever.)

And though we can surmise from the title where Jake and Abby's marriage is headed, the episode portrays it with a lot of complexity. Though our first glimpse of Jake suggests that they're breaking up because he's cheating on her, we later learn that he wasn't until he found evidence of her emotional cheating in her emails -- but when she hooks up with another man, it's not her email recipient. It's weird to say that I like that this particular marriage isn't ending due to some other great love affair Abby has on hold, but that it's some combination of boredom, bed death, and one partner's resentment of another over the imbalance between their financial contributions to the household does feel more true-to-life than a romantic fantasy of what ends marriages.

The secondary characters are also well drawn. Abby's friends Lyla and Phoebe have kids at the same school as Abby's, and we learn from a muttered aside from Max that they're relatively new to Abby's life, which is tantalizing: what will or could happen to strain their relationship, and what may happen when her older friends show back up to remind her of her pre-estrangement life? Phoebe and Lyla are also divorced, and model diametrically opposed divorce behaviour: while Phoebe has started sleeping with her ex again, which he pays her for, Lyla has a tail on hers and sets him up for a DUI arrest so that she can prove him unfit, get sole custody of the kids, and cut off her support payments to him. Meanwhile, Max is happily (gay-)married, and judges Abby for giving up on her marriage when "it's not like anybody was getting hit." Lots of perspectives and potential paths forward for Abby to choose from!

This is also a very well-cast show. I've always liked Edelstein, and she has a great, natural acting style in the role that goes a long way to making her character compelling; she and Adelstein are very convincing as people who used to love each other and now know how to push all of each other's buttons, as we see early on in a scene in which they text snotty remarks to each other across the kitchen great room with their seemingly oblivious kids sitting between them. Toward the end, when they're about to try to prove something to each other by having sex again after a long hiatus, it actually seems like they might do it before they stop at the last second: that there's still something between them is another way the show honours what I imagine is the real, knotty experience of divorce.

Oh! And! This is a show that makes some very shrewd observations about Los Angeles. The boutique scene where Phoebe whips her tits out to show off her boob job to Abby, and then gets joined by a stranger who hears Phoebe's surgeon's name and also got the same work done by him? Could totally happen. In fact, Phoebe is pure L.A. the whole way through, from dressing her daughter in the same Stevie Nicks-y outfit for school to her vague ideas about starting some kind of business that "helps people" somehow -- she's meditating on the details, because of course she is.

...But?

When Phoebe and Lyla take Abby out to a club to try to get her laid, Phoebe's "shock" move of kissing Abby is actually predictable and lame. And the meanie mommies trying to ply Abby with coffee for the details they've gleaned about her crumbling marriage were already kind of hack when they were plot devices on The New Adventures Of Old Christine. Finally: Will is supposed to be twenty-eight? Warren Christie, who plays him, is definitely attractive, but he's also a year younger than I am, and I am...not twenty-nine. (I'm thirty!)

...So?

This is rich subject matter, handled in what is, so far, a grown-up way with a minimum of wish-fulfillment fantasy (and if Abby keeps hooking up with Will, her pretty great bar trick, I won't be mad). All this plus a perfect wardrobe for Abby? In.