“One’s ears are not garbage cans,” Marcia Gay Harden says to Neil Patrick Harris in the first episode of Uncoupled, her voice an exquisitely velvety purr. If you couldn’t tell Harden’s character Claire was wealthy from her outfit (head-to-toe winter white) or her front door (a keyed elevator that leads straight to her Manhattan penthouse) you’d know it from the way she talks to her estate agent Michael, played by Harris with signature boyish pluck. Claire is chastising Michael for making a tiny ruckus in her lobby, but soon she’ll be chewing his ear off about her impending divorce from her philandering husband – a screed that’s littered with profanity. The joke, I guess, is that rich people get to break their own rules, but it’s the deliciously uttered sentence that stayed with me.
The new Netflix sitcom from Darren Star – the prolific writer/producer behind the American soaps Beverly Hills, 90210 and Sex and the City – and Modern Family producer Jeffrey Richman picks up on the day Michael learns his partner of 17 years is leaving him, seemingly out of the blue. Throughout the eight-episode season, the luxury broker confronts the realities of being an “uncoupled” gay man in his forties in New York City, a lonely relationship status that bonds him with his newly single client, Claire, and his single business partner Suzanne, played by My Wife and Kids star Tisha Campbell.
