Happily Divorced

I wanted to like Happily Divorced, Fran Drescher’s new show. It had great possibilities because it tackled an issue that is rarely talked about. The fact that this show was appearing on TVLand should have given me a hint. Fran Drescher and her gay ex-husband Peter Marc Jacobson are co-producing it. It is autobiographical, telling the story about a woman who finds out her husband is gay after eighteen years of marriage. Obviously I could relate to this story having come out after nineteen years of marriage.

The trouble is the pilot covers too much territory in twenty-two minutes. To say that it scratches the surface of the issue would be giving it too much credit. In the first episode Fran’s husband played by John Michael Higgins tells Fran he thinks he is gay, they decide to continue to live together and Fran starts dating, bringing her new boyfriend home to be chaperoned by her ex.

I loved The Nanny. It was pure fluff, a fairy tale. The subject matter of this show may be a fairy tale but it is not fluff. They treat the subject too lightly, ignoring any of the angst that Fran and her real life husband must have gone through to come to a place where they could continue to live together, knowing he was gay.

They could have dealt seriously with the issue and still had a funny show. Fran and Peter may still live together but the way the relationship is dealt with in the sitcom it comes off as unrealistic. I think a better place for  a program like that would have been HBO or Showtime where they could have dealt with the subject matter more realistically.