I want to introduce you to a guy named Rob Delaney. Maybe you know the name already. He's a comic actor who co-created and co-starred in the hit TV show Catastrophe. It's a pretty standard rom com. Hapless American guy meets brash Irish gal and hilarity ensues. But I was blown away by how Rob Delaney inhabited that character. He was self-effacing and loveable with a kind of humor that makes you laugh out loud and then trail off because something about it burns a little. There was a sadness underneath all the witty banter. And that made it human to me in a way that TV shows usually can't capture.
It was only when I read Rob Delaney's memoir that I realized the source of that sadness. It wasn't a performance — he was living through the worst of things. Between seasons 2 and 3 of the show, Rob and his wife found out that their youngest son Henry had brain cancer. His family needed the income so he wrote and filmed Season 3 when Henry was in the hospital getting treatment. It was a long and heartbreaking process. Henry died when he was just two-and-a-half years old. Rob wrote about it in his memoir, A Heart That Works. And I talked to him in 2022, right after it came out.
