For decades, shows like Sex and the City, Girlfriends, Gilmore Girls, and Grey’s Anatomy have made being in your 30s look as fabulous and ambitious as ever. But your 40s? Forget about it, at least based on the few complex representations of women in their 40s on TV. However, when Catastrophe came along in 2015, the British sitcom started to change that—and made me eagerly anticipate turning 40.
Not enough people watched Catastrophe. Created by Sharon Horgan (now of Bad Sisters fame) and Rob Delaney, the unflinching sitcom tells the very unconventional love story of Sharon Morris, an Irish schoolteacher who’s “on the wrong side of 40,” and Rob Norris, an American ad exec traveling in London on business. The pair have a chance meeting in a bar and then spend Rob’s entire six-day trip hooking up before they inevitably part. A month later, Sharon realizes she’s pregnant, and Rob uproots his life to be with her and raise their child in the U.K. The creators’ own lives inspired the premise; Horgan conceived her first child when she and her now-husband had only dated for six months, and Delaney is now sober and an expat living in London.
