‘Catastrophe’ at 10: Revisiting Its Depiction of Women Over 40


For decades, shows like Sex and the City, Girlfriends, Gilmore Girls, and Grey’s Anatomy have made being in your 30s look as fabulous and ambitious as ever. But your 40s? Forget about it, at least based on the few complex representations of women in their 40s on TV. However, when Catastrophe came along in 2015, the British sitcom started to change that—and made me eagerly anticipate turning 40.

Not enough people watched Catastrophe. Created by Sharon Horgan (now of Bad Sisters fame) and Rob Delaney, the unflinching sitcom tells the very unconventional love story of Sharon Morris, an Irish schoolteacher who’s “on the wrong side of 40,” and Rob Norris, an American ad exec traveling in London on business. The pair have a chance meeting in a bar and then spend Rob’s entire six-day trip hooking up before they inevitably part. A month later, Sharon realizes she’s pregnant, and Rob uproots his life to be with her and raise their child in the U.K. The creators’ own lives inspired the premise; Horgan conceived her first child when she and her now-husband had only dated for six months, and Delaney is now sober and an expat living in London.

A woman (Sharon Horgan as Sharon Morris) wraps her hands around her legs as she sits next to a man (Rob Delaney as Rob Norris) offering her an engagement ring, in 'Catastrophe.'

Rob Norris (Rob Delaney, right) proposes to Sharon Morris (Sharon Horgan, left) while they sit on the curb outside a London bar.

(Image credit: Amazon Studios)

Catastrophe was released on the U.K.’s Channel 4 on January 19, 2015, before making it stateside as an Amazon Original that June. I got around to watching it one month after graduating college when only the first two installments of its four-season run were released, and it remains a formative memory on how I think of aging. Each season has six episodes, all co-written by Horgan and Delaney. Season 1 covers Sharon’s pregnancy with their son Frankie; the season 2 premiere fast-forwards nearly three years to the couple welcoming their daughter, Muireann (a traditional Irish name only Sharon and her relatives can pronounce, in a running gag). Throughout its run, the dark comedy is unflinchingly honest about how brutal, hilarious, disgusting, beautiful, and hard it is to maintain the fictional Sharon and Rob’s life together every day.

Sharon’s age is an inextricable part of the series, and it comments on how age is linked with motherhood. It’s a large reason why she decides to see the pregnancy through in the first place. As she describes to her brother Fergal (Jonathan Forbes) in season 1, episode 2, “They’re a little bit harder to make when you’re old–older. I can’t just rip it out and plant another one up there when the time is right.” The subject of Sharon’s age mostly comes up within medical settings, mostly standout scenes where a perpetually-bored OB/GYN (played by Tobias Menzies) relays the latest update of Sharon’s high-risk gestation, as well as her own anxieties. While a lesser show may make a punchline out of Sharon being beyond her 30s, Horgan and Delaney never make her the butt of the joke; instead, they point at the absurdity of how medicine treats women having a child past age 35. Catastrophe was the first instance I’d heard of the term “geriatric pregnancy,” and the joke wasn’t a chance to laugh at Sharon, but a chance to point out how wild it is that such a term would exist. If anything, it’s even funnier because, by that scene in episode 4, no one would use that term for someone as young-at-heart as Sharon.

Sharon Morris (Sharon Horgan), holding a piece of paper while standing in an airport, in 'Catastrophe.'

Sharon (Sharon Horgan) wearing her signature denim overalls.

(Image credit: Amazon Studios)

Before Catastrophe, I’d never seen a female character in her 40s to whom I instantly related. To be fair, I wasn’t an extremely well-rounded TV watcher at the time. I hadn’t yet watched classic TV comedies like Golden Girls or Murphy Brown or Maude that portrayed gutsy women over 40, and I didn’t connect to self-sacrificing sitcom moms as a fresh college grad entering adulthood. Sharon was the first woman I saw approaching middle age with whom I had anything in common. I saw my dark humor and tendency to respond to vulnerability and big feelings with sarcasm in her. She had also studied writing in college, and I loved her cozy bachelorette apartment and her artistic, denim-forward style. At times I found myself imagining what her life could’ve been like before she met Rob, the ways it could’ve intersected with the nebulous life I was taking my first steps into. Most of all, I loved that she was the first female character over 40 I saw as someone I could eventually become.



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