HBO’s Divorce isn’t the kind of television comedy for which Thomas Haden Church (top) remains best-known, and he couldn’t be happier about that.
“I did 10 years of sitcoms that were punchline, punchline, punchline,” he says. “I wanted something different.”
Divorce, which premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. ET, is that.
Church and Sarah Jessica Parker (below) play Robert and Frances, a long-married suburban couple with two school-age children, Lila (Sterling Jerins, below) and Tom (Charlie Kilgore, below).
When we meet Robert and Frances, they are about to split up. As anyone who has had first-, second- or 28th-hand experience with divorce knows, that’s not the premise for a traditional laff riot.
But then Divorce creator Sharon Horgan seems partial to dark comedies, including her current BBC/Amazon Prime series Catastrophe.
Parker picked Divorce for her own return to HBO, also in a rather different role than when she played Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.
The 56-year-old Church is probably best known to television watchers for his six seasons as Lowell Mather on Wings. He also co-starred with Debra Messing for two seasons on Ned & Stacey, and did some sitcom writing himself.
“By 2000, I was done with the laugh machine,” he says. “Setup, payoff, setup, payoff.”
He turned to film and in 2003 costarred with Paul Giamatti in Sideways, which landed him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
“Sideways was an amazing experience,” he says. “Paul and I and [director] Alex [Payne] set out to do a different kind of comedy, with characters just having a human experience. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was pathetic.”
He says that same sense of possibility attracted him to Divorce, where it quickly becomes clear that both Robert and Frances are complex characters riddled with flaws and redeeming qualities.
Robert is a former Wall Street guy who earned enough – Church figures “maybe $350G a year” – to quit and start his own business flipping houses. Frances was okay with this, he suggests, “as long as it didn’t affect their lifestyle.”
But Robert’s new job did create new issues, like cash flow, and his responses are sometimes jagged.
“In some ways Robert is sharp and in other ways he’s just blind,” says Church. “I think in a number of ways he’s trying to hold back.”
That’s a challenge in the first episode, because he learns Frances has been having an affair. That’s nominally the trigger for the split, though we soon learn that, to no one’s surprise, deeper problems have been bubbling around for some time.
“We go to a counseling session and Robert is so quick to jump on her,” Church says. “But Frances is willing to have it out. She’s a fighter. She says let’s go back a ways, there are skeletons in your closet, too.
“As we go further through, his innocence is pretty tarnished.”
The split also affects the kids, naturally, and then begins to ripple through family and friends, notably Frances’s neurotic pal Diane (Molly Shannon) and her BFF Dallas (Talia Balsam).
It also reaches Robert’s friend Nick (Tracy Letts), who has the single funniest line of anyone in the first couple of episodes. (No spoilers on that one here.)
Letts and the rest of the cast do shoulder a good part of the show’s humor, particularly when things aren’t all that amusing between Frances and Robert, and Church say that’s a tribute to the team’s depth.
He’s a particularly worshipful fan of Letts, he says, but he’s been loving the whole ensemble.
“I’ve never worked this long in New York before,” says Church, who was born in California and lives in Texas. “There are so many gifted actors, all these theater actors. It’s a terrific cast.”
The humor itself, says Church, flows from the characters’ actions and words, however painful or absurd.
“As an actor, I do what you always try to do,” he says. “If it’s a funny situation, you try to make it funnier. It’s entertaining to the audience and not funny to the characters at all.”
Other scenes in Divorce won’t be funny to anyone, including viewers, who may at some point want some indication where the whole story is going.
The comedy designation would suggest at least a moderately happy ending, but Church says the eight-episode first season, at least, promises nothing that neat.
“We’ve all discussed every conceivable path for the show,” he says. “Do they get divorced? Do they stay together? Do they divorce and remarry? Would they start other relationships? We talked about Robert potentially with a younger woman.”
But Church says something else is also at play.
“I believe Robert is still in love with Frances,” he says. “She’s the one that blinks first in terms of ‘Do I love my husband?’ So maybe the question is whether the marriage is worth the endurance contest it’s become.
“Sarah Jessica’s character is in serious no-man’s land. She deals with it in therapy, with her friends. She deals with it in the Christmas episode.”
Christmas episode?
Yep, on Nov. 13. Hey, every comedy has one.