“I’m Sorry” Is Perfect. Somebody Pick It Up.
At a bar with a bunch of single friends a few years ago, my friend and I took our buddy’s phone and went through Tinder on his behalf. At the time, this friend had been with his girlfriend for nearly a decade, and I’d been married to my husband for three years.
As we scrolled through and judged every photo we saw, we agreed we would crush it at online dating. We never got to do it! It wasn’t a thing in 2010! It’d be so fun!
Everyone’s response to us was immediate and correct: Oh, f*** you guys.
This is the essence of “Divorce Fantasy,” an episode of “I’m Sorry,” which is a fantastic show created by Andrea Savage that is getting canceled due to COVID-related costs. The show was already filming Season 3 in March, when COVID forced production to shut down. Both seasons of this show are great and you should watch them now.
The premise of “I’m Sorry” is simple. Andrea Warren (Savage) is a comedy writer living in Los Angeles with her lawyer husband Mike (Tom Everett Scott) and five-year-old daughter Amelia (Olive Petrucci). Andrea is a responsible adult who does boring grown-up stuff, but she’s also raunchy as hell and her friends are other weirdos in the LA comedy scene, people her husband works with, or other parents. That’s it. That’s the show. And it’s perfect.
In “Divorce Fantasy,” Andrea is pushing her best friend Jennifer (Allison Tolman) back out into the dating world. Jennifer went through an ugly divorce more than a year earlier and Andrea has decided that it’s time her friend has fun again.
And while Andrea is very happily married to Mike, she has a ridiculous, detailed fantasy about being divorced. Even the phrase “I’m a divorcee” has a great ring to it, she says. But Jennifer is hurting, because of course she is, and even though they have some fun, their first night out together to meet some guys doesn’t go as planned. The episode is funny and sweet and a little deranged. But it hinges on reality. People in healthy marriages have fantasies, too. And who doesn’t sometimes live vicariously through their friends?
This show gets what being a grown-up woman is like. It understands the fast closeness you feel with the people who share your kid’s school. It gets the loving, but frustrating relationships many women have with their parents. It nails the weirdness of being both somebody’s mother and someone who makes dick jokes around their friends. And I could write a tome about how spot-on the platonic friendship between writing partner Kyle (Jason Mantzoukas) and Andrea is in Season 1.
Moments throughout the series are simultaneously mundane and memorable. Andrea’s mom encourages her to put on lipstick for her husband. Andrea bumbles her way through a conversation with a total stranger in a grocery store. Andrea’s arch nemesis is her neighbor “Shorts Guy” (Steve Zissis), who she just *cannot* make small talk with for the 100th time. I have been in some form of these situations many, many times, and if you’re an adult you probably have been, too.
I am the demographic for this show. I am a mom in my early- to mid-thirties. I like a good joke that goes a little too far and makes you blush. This show feels written for me, and I have a hunch there are a lot of other people like me who just haven’t seen it yet.
Somebody: Pick up this show. There’s nothing else out there that gets it so right.
