In her multiple roles as performer, writer, director, producer and showrunner, Sharon Horgan has become one of the most influential television comedy figures on both sides of the Atlantic in the 2010s. Her success in breaking into the notoriously difficult US context as an Irish artist with a track record of writing for British television is striking, not least because of her markedly unapologetic, ‘in-your-face’ style. She is often revered as a ‘queen of difficult women’ (Wiseman 2016), and her work in shows such as Pulling (2006–9), Catastrophe (2015–) and Divorce (2016–) depicts what critics refer to as the ‘brutal’ (Blake 2016), ‘bleak’ (Wollaston 2016) existence of ‘brittle’ (Gray 2016) women who regularly ‘f*** up’ (Horgan, in Armstrong 2016). Horgan's comedies tackle complex and uncomfortable aspects of contemporary heterosexual womanhood that seemingly resonate for some women on both sides of the Atlantic in ways that I will link to the popular discursive ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill 2007) that is highly evident across US/UK cultural contexts. The shows grapple with the postfeminist emphasis on heterosexual ‘romance’ as a key arbiter of selfhood, offering relief through humour from the paradoxical pressures of postfeminism while navigating the imperatives of relatedness at the same time. Looking primarily at Catastrophe and Divorce, this chapter interrogates the idea of ‘romance’, and its tropes that are so familiar in both the US and UK (and beyond), as symptomatic of the complex entanglement of heterosexual womanhood with postfeminist imperatives, with the aim of exploring how romantic television comedy can unravel the psychological knots associated with the postfeminist experience.

When commenting on her work, Horgan has remarked that it amounts to a kind of personal therapy (Wiseman 2016). She draws on her own lived experience of relationships as well as that of trusted friends, suggesting that comedy works here as a form of therapeutic engagement not only for the writer, but also, perhaps, for audiences at home on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the fact that Horgan usually co-writes her series, in press coverage of the work, she is usually singled out as lead author, and this chapter follows this logic, taking Horgan as its focus.