A version of this story about Sharon Horgan first appeared in the print edition of TheWrap Magazine’s Fall TV Issue.
Sharon Horgan, recently Emmy-nominated for her Amazon series “Catastrophe,” created and writes the new show “Divorce,” which marks the return of “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker to HBO a dozen years after that iconic show went off the air.
How did “Divorce” come about?
I’d been developing stuff for HBO for years, and nothing had made it past script stage. They wanted SJ back on their channel, and she was looking for something. They gave her a couple of scripts I’d written for another project that didn’t get made and said, “Do you want to hook up with her?”
And so they set us up on a kind of date in New York, and we met and talked about what Sarah Jessica liked to watch, and was interested in talking about. We had a good old conversation, and I just went away and thought up the “Divorce” thing.
And it happened really quickly then, because it’s Sarah Jessica Parker. When I pitch a show, it takes years to come to fruition. But with her, it went very quickly to series.
It’s a big deal for lots of people that she’s returning to an HBO series.
I had to block that out a bit when the script was initially commissioned, because if I thought about it too hard I would have lost all my skills.
It is a big deal: She hasn’t been on TV for 10 years or so, it’s HBO and she’s the nation’s sweetheart. I didn’t want to let her down, but I also wanted it to be completely different from anything she’d done before.
Your show titles are “Catastrophe” and “Divorce”… Do you lean toward the bad stuff that happens?
[Laughs] Yeah. It’s the fun stuff to write, because it’s super cathartic. Lots of stuff I should be saying to my husband, that I can just put in a script and put on the screen for the world to see.
“Divorce” premieres Oct. 9 on HBO.
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