Take Three: Divorce

Divorce: Season 1, Episode 3 “Counseling” (B+)

I’m glad I stuck with this show since, by episode three, it’s reached a great point where it’s really found its footing. Starting out with Frances telling a prospective client that being headhunted could lead to devastating failure summarized the whole mood of this series. From there, we got to see Frances and Robert together at counseling, which was extremely insightful and highly entertaining. Robert’s obsession with Julian being French and his unwillingness to let that go paled in comparison to the shocking revelation that Frances believes she slept with him a whopping 32 times. The marriage counselor sided with Frances in a big way, and her turning the conversation into one about his emotional affair that involved him lying about delivering water to first responders on 9/11 showed that he was equally guilty of contributing to the dissolution of the marriage as he was. We saw Frances struggling to catch a break in episode two, and in this installment we got to see Robert trying hard to make his life interesting since, as he confided to Nick, he doesn’t even have Frances to talk to about what he’s currently going through. I like that Nick’s first words when we woke up from his coma were to tell Robert to shut up, and he’s jumping right back into the same bed of crazy with his warm, forgiving embrace of the wife who shot him. Deciding not to continue in therapy since neither of them liked it was a serious reminder of what’s really going on, and saying that they’d have the lawyers call each other when neither of them actually had lawyers was an important transition to the meat of this action, which at least now seems like it won’t be nearly as volatile as Robert promised.