The trailer for Stefan Golaszewski’s new BBC drama has just been released, and it looks like it’s going to be a real tear-jerker of a show.
Starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker as a husband and wife who have been married for 27 years, the teaser trailer, which runs at just forty seconds, shows shots of the duo in all those deeply unromantic, yet deeply romantic moments that make up the life of a couple.
They are slouched on a sofa eating crisps, bickering on an aeroplane (about jacket potatoes), kissing in the kitchen and then talking about the dishwasher. It’s soft and tender and truthful, and looks like it’s going to be an utterly heart-melting (and breaking) watch.
Sean Bean is best known for his roles in Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, while Nicola Walker is a British TV favourite, starring in BBC’s Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax and The Split and ITV’s Unforgotten.
The cast also includes James Bolam (New Tricks, The Likely Lads), Henry Lloyd-Hughes (The Inbetweeners, Ragdoll) and Chantelle Alle (We Are Lady Parts, Mood).
The four-part drama has been written and directed by Stefan Golaszewski, who created the award-winning British sitcoms Him & Her, about a twenty-something couple in London, and Mum, about the life of a 59-year-old woman after her husband’s death. Golaszewski was the Cambridge Footlights President between 2002 and 2003.
Sean Bean joked with The Guardian in December about the forthcoming show’s subject matter – he is currently on his fifth marriage. He said: “the show is about a long-term, 27-year marriage, which isn’t something I know about.
“It’s about the small things that happen in a marriage, how you stay together. There are really few words in this. It’s all in the silences and pauses. So it’s another very different shift for me, which is what I like.”
The show comes amidst a period when meditations on couples and marriage on screen seem to be particularly popular: Noah Baumbach’s 2019 Marriage Story starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver focused on a couple’s divorce, Stephen Daldry’s 2021 BBC TV film Together told the story of a long-term couple in lockdown, and Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain starred in the 2021 HBO miniseries Scenes from a Marriage.
