Bravo, a network formerly known for high-brow programming, is better-known in recent years for the Real Housewives franchise, in which rich supposed friends spend their time back-stabbing and throwing wine in each other’s faces. So it’s almost ironic that Bravo’s first scripted series, focuses on (still rich) ex-wives, but actual friends. The Girlfriends’ Guide To Divorce’s first 12 episodes offered a fantastic female-focused drama featuring fabulous women over 40. It almost resembles a next-chapter Sex And The City, but its players are a lot more real and down-to-earth than Carrie Bradshaw and company, despite their plush surroundings.
Bravo smartly chose some excellent source material. Vicki Iovine is a former lawyer (and one-time Playboy centerfold), who wrote a series of books called the Girlfriends’ Guides, starting with a guide to pregnancy, working on up to toddlerhood, even kids’ birthday parties. (Any pregnant people or moms of small children out there, I recommend these guides with my entire heart.) Just like the lead in the series, Vicki got divorced from her husband, music producer Jimmy Iovine, after four kids and many years of marriage. Her franchise at an end, she started a Huffington Post column on divorce (again, just like Abby in the series), and now has completed the cycle by creating a series from this despair in her own life. Her writing has always been vastly approachable and conversational, even for her readers who didn’t happen to live in the glamorous section of Los Angeles, offering realistic life advice for everything from breast-feeding to playdates. Iovine’s relatable voice has easily translated to this series, helped along by Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer and producer Marti Noxon.
Besides Iovine, Girlfriends’ Guide snagged another major asset: Lisa Edelstein (House) as the series lead. Her Abby is simultaneously strong, vulnerable, nice, funny, everything we want to root for in our heroine as she carves out a new life for herself, charting new paths in her relationships and career. She is able to transform an earthquake into a living-room camping party, or a public meltdown into a new book idea. The girlfriends surrounding her are also well-rounded, dominant female characters, like a former supermodel trying to find out what she’s actually good at, a take-no-prisoners divorce lawyer unsurprisingly down on marriage, and an outspoken friend from college. The series offers a gay marriage as well with Abby’s landscaper brother and his high-powered husband. I’m not sure why Janeane Garafalo departed after six episodes, but she added some needed bite to the show at its start. But it remains fascinating to watch how these formidable women deal as the main relationship in their life dissolves: how they grapple with whole new territories in their 40s, while still having to stay strong for their kids. They bond at the coffeeshop over lattes instead of SATC’s Cosmopolitans, but this female support becomes a necessity and a stability their now-unstable lives depend on.
The most fascinating relationship on the show, though, is the one between Abby and her estranged husband (Paul Adelstein). When we meet him, he’s sliding into bed after openly sleeping with someone else, so we immediately want to classify him as the villain. As it turns out, he only started up with Becca, the 20something star of a Buffy-type TV show, after Abby’s emotional affair with another dad at their kids’ school (C. Thomas Howell). Throughout the season, the couple has gone back and forth as Jake gets his own apartment that’s a far cry from the family home he shared with Abby, and he and Abby both start dating other people. But the two still share an emotional connection from all those years together; they still get each other’s jokes; they still have to present a united front to the kids. This has left the fate of their entire relationship as a kind of question mark hanging over the season, even as Abby gets closer to her young, hot new boyfriend Will (Warren Christie).