Scenes From a Marriage

Who would think the most harrowing dissection of marital dissolution since SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (rent the mini-series, not the feature version) would be a reality show on TLC about a pair of yokels who baselined a fertility drug? And yet there it was: he's moved out, moved on and seems bloated from alcohol addiction; she's turned from a simple, Mom-Jeans wearing double-shift dialysis nurse into an exurban Prada-head with a reverse mullet and an addiction to signing copies of her own memoir. All this in three years. 

Or was it just the last six months? Apparently, that was when things started to go wrong -- with both their marriage and Jon's hair transplants, which, like a poorly maintained lawn, only seems to be blossoming in the front of the yard. What did it? Jon's wandering eye? A new house on 24 acres? Kate's incessant eyebrow tweezing? Whatever it was, most crushingly they've never discussed it. At the episode's end, when they were sitting together on the couch for the first time, neither could quite explain what happened, or even what would happen next. It was marriage, Bergman-style: tightly coiled secrets, repressed anger, unexpressed disgust, all bursting open and then leaving in its wake nothing but pain and a sort of slack-jawed confusion.

And next week they're making brownies!