Rob Delaney & Sharon Horgan on Love, Grief and Laughter

ROB DELANEY, CO-CREATOR, “CATASTROPHE”: Yes. I mean, I noticed now, almost 10 years ago, that Sharon followed me on Twitter, and she had created a sitcom a few years prior called “Pulling,” which was just the greatest sitcom I’ve ever seen in my life. And so, I wrote to her and I said, “Thank you for following me on this silly website.” And she wrote back, and then we became friendly. She came and saw me do standup and then we would work together on little stuff. And then one day, we just thought we might, you know, see if we could write a sitcom together.

SHARON HORGAN, CO-CREATOR, “CATASTROPHE”: Yes. I mean, that’s sort of it in a nutshell. But I’d also, you know, from seeing Rob’s standup, really loved how he talked about stuff and really loved how he talked about marriage in particularly. And so, I think we sort of knew it would work, you know, our styles together, blended.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Well, I mean, what were you trying to tell us all about marriage? Because look, it is extraordinary, and you do, you know, look like you are having sort of real-life discussions, but you also — I mean, look, there’s a lot of angst, there’s a lot of humor, there’s a lot of, you know, tears, there’s a lot of laughter, but in the end, you don’t really have massive rows. When one of you, you know, sort of kind of irritates the other one or, you know, get some angry, it’s not like you storm out and you never talk to each other again or have the big sun, you managed to have a mature response that perhaps a lot of couples may not have in the end. How do you come up with that?

DELANEY: I think we wanted a show that marriage is interesting. I think we felt a lot of sitcoms, not all of them, because — of course, there are great ones. But some of them sort of did marriage a disservice and kind of made it look like a slug, which marriage usually, seems to me, is either you are like you want to kill your spouse, and not in a funny way like you are figuring out, how do I kill them and you want to wipe the browser history so you don’t get caught. I mean, you are really planning their death.

Then five minutes later, you are like — you have your — you’re wrapped around their ankles being like, “I can’t believe you let me kiss you ever.” And so, it’s — you know, you rocket between those two poles, it’s not like — you’re not like, “Hey, she’s driving me nuts,” or like, “All he does is golf,” that is ridiculous. No marriage is like that, it’s those two poles.

HORGAN: Yes. And also, we realized — I mean, when we put them in a difficult situation, when something terrible happened and they did argue or did sort of decide they weren’t going to talk anymore, that’s not very interesting on-screen, having two people, you know, just constantly shouting at each other or not communicating at all. So, we would find ways for them to make each other laugh, and I think that’s also a little bit of the secret sauce in it, is that they just really like each other’s company, better than anyone else in the world.