Catastrophe

Channel 4 broadcast the first series of Catastrophe in January 2015, six episodes written by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney and produced by Horgan's Merman alongside Avalon. Horgan had spent a decade sharpening this register in British comedy, from Pulling onwards; Delaney was an American stand-up who had built an audience on Twitter and had never carried a scripted series. The pairing was unlikely and the writing partnership turned out to be the whole point: four series ran to February 2019, all of them written by the two leads together.

The setup is a one-week stand with consequences. Rob, a Boston advertising executive, is in London on business; Sharon is an Irish schoolteacher living there; the week ends and the phone rings. He relocates, and the series watches two adults in their forties attempt to assemble a relationship in the wrong order. Ben Taylor, later of Sex Education, directed the early episodes with a plain, unhurried camera that leaves the dialogue exposed. Ashley Jensen and Mark Bonnar play the friends, and Carrie Fisher appears as Rob's mother Mia in what became her last television role.

The writing took the BAFTA Craft award for Best Writer: Comedy in 2016 along with two Royal Television Society prizes, and drew a Primetime Emmy writing nomination — rare for a British half-hour. Critics were close to unanimous, and the series is now routinely cited as the point at which the British relationship sitcom stopped being coy about marriage, money and the body. Horgan's subsequent Bad Sisters is its direct descendant.