The wait is over: Season 2 of Amazon’s blissfully filthy-mouthed comedy “Catastrophe” premieres on Amazon Prime next Friday, and once again you will find yourself wishing it had three times as many episodes (like the first season, this one consists of six).
Comics Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney reprise their roles as Sharon and Rob, the respectively Irish and American couple who got pregnant during a tryst and decided to make a go of it. They’re still in London as the new season begins, though — and this is a mild spoiler, but not if you’ve seen the trailer — the series jumps forward to the very end of her second pregnancy, while their first son is now a toddler.
The show is necessarily more complicated, and palpably darker, this time around. Its creators are both parents themselves, and this season is a wide-ranging look at the chaos that is raising small children and trying to hang onto your sanity and identity — though, as Delaney explained in an interview, the show’s name “isn’t about bad things happening. It’s a directly lifted allusion to Zorba the Greek, the book and the film, where Zorba is asked: do you have a wife? And he says: ‘I have the wife, I have the kids, I have the full catastrophe.’ That’s what it is.”
Still, bad things do happen — several of them right away, as the couple hosts friends and family to meet the new baby. Her name, Muireann — an Irish name chosen by Sharon — immediately becomes a running joke, as nobody can figure out how to pronounce it. Meanwhile, Sharon’s father (Gary Lilburn) is demonstrating signs of dementia and Rob’s terrible mother (a returning Carrie Fisher, hurray!) has long overstayed her welcome with them.
In other words, the kind of stuff that is always happening in real life. And Delaney and Horgan find endless biting humor in embracing every bit of it. In this, I think the second season, maybe even more than the first, is a pitch-perfect response to the current, especially American obsession with masquerading perfection and unassailable happiness; I’m thinking particularly of Facebook here, but more generally the notion that parents — and everyone else, but it’s really noticeable with parents — feel compelled to act as if they’ve constantly got everything under control and life is great.
These are the people the fictional Sharon and Rob (and, I’d wager, the real ones too) find terribly dull. The ones who look at you with puzzlement when you crack a joke, as the “mombies” do to Sharon when she tries to assimilate into their pack.
