Nick Hornby on Marriage: For Better, for Worse, for 10 Minutes at a Time

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/arts/television/state-of-the-union-nick-hornby-sundance.html

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Tom and Louise meet up every week, same time, same place, same order: London Pride for him, white wine for her. They chat, down their drinks, rush out the door to the office of their marriage counselor.

Then the credits roll.

Played by Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike, Tom and Louise are the troubled, time-crunched couple in the writer Nick Hornby’s new 10-episode series, “State of the Union.” A comedy of modern marriage, the show challenges conventions of economy and form: Each episode is set in the same Victorian pub in southwest London, each plays out in real time. And each lasts about 10 minutes — just long enough for the characters to swallow some liquid courage before disappearing into a therapist’s office we never see.

“There’s something deliciously, essentially witty, about the fact that we’re outside the main event,” Pike said in a phone interview last month. Every week this couple goes to therapy, she explained, but the camera never follows them in.

Call it a very limited series — a prestige experiment that rethinks how a TV series can be constructed and consumed. Or, more cynically, it’s a gentle end-run around attention-deficit viewers: Episodes are over almost before you can click the back button on your browser.

Like the animated Netflix anthology “Love, Death & Robots” and the semi-autobiographical Netflix sitcom, “Special,” “State of the Union,” which starts Monday on SundanceTV, is the latest in a string of major TV productions to explore shorter forms. But it didn’t begin that way. Hornby said he had dreamed up the story of Tom, a jobless rock critic, and Louise, a gerontologist, “a while ago,” but not necessarily as a TV show.

“I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said by phone last month. So he put the story to the side.

Then he saw “High Maintenance,” each episode of which sketches a drug dealer’s interactions with a different customer. Now a series on HBO, it began in 2012 as a web series with episodes no longer than 12 minutes, some as short as five.

“High Maintenance was the first time that I saw someone think: ‘Hey, why does a show have to be 30 minutes or 53 minutes?’” Hornby said. “It just seemed like such a neat way of telling a story.”

He borrowed that neat way, tweaked for Louise and Tom, and pitched the show to producers at See-Saw Films, who were struck by what Hornby could accomplish in each 10-minute, dialogue-heavy chunk. SundanceTV, intrigued by the idea, agreed to distribute it.

“Things oftentimes are too long because they can be,” said Sarah Barnett, president of the Entertainment Networks group at AMC Networks, of which Sundance TV is part. “‘State of the Union’ is exactly the right idea for its format, the shape of it is entirely right for the ideas it’s trying to convey; it’s structurally perfect,” she said.

Stephen Frears, who directed the film adaptation of Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” signed on to direct all 10 episodes. “Nick Hornby is a friend of mine,” Frears said, a little gruffly, by telephone. “Why would I not do them?”

Maybe because it isn’t easy to make 10 episodes visually interesting when each plays out in the same location? (O.K., Tom and Louise occasionally cross the street.) Or with the same two actors? (O.K., there are a few cameos.) Frears did what he could to make the setup feel less static by alternating close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots, toggling between short takes and luxuriously long ones, varying locations within the pub.

“What I learned very quickly was that, really, the only people who could tell the story were the actors,” he said. “The normal tools I have to tell a story weren’t available to me.”

Those actors had a surprising amount of story to tell. The bonus of the real-time format, Hornby said, was that it allowed him to write almost as much dialogue as he wanted. In movies he usually has to limit himself to two-page scenes, to four-page scenes.

“State of the Union” let him go on and on, he said, though he was careful to structure each episode with a beginning, middle and end. A couple of them even have cliffhangers.

Pike and O’Dowd found the scripts exciting — they found them nerve-racking, too. In most movies, Pike said, she gets one or two long and juicy scenes. “State” is nothing but juicy scenes.

“I probably had more words here than I did in my last two films put together,” she said. And Frears filmed the series in less than three weeks, shooting a new episode every day.

Last July, during a heat wave that Hornby called “the hottest weeks of my lifetime,” the props master kept Pike’s wine glass filled with diluted apple juice; O’Dowd drank pints of a nonalcoholic beer, St. Peter’s Without Gold, run through a soda siphon and darkened with food coloring. After each day’s shooting wrapped, O’Dowd and Pike would stay at the pub, splitting a bottle of actual wine and rehearsing the next day’s pages, trying not to panic.

“I’ve got to tell you, as an exercise in memory, it was definitely the greatest challenge I’ve ever had,” O’Dowd said.

Frears sounded less traumatized. “I sat in a pub for two and a half weeks,” he said. “It was a real punishment.”

The scripts aren’t punishing either. They are clever, digressive, reasonably hopeful. Tom and Louise often discuss their relationship using elaborate metaphors, like Brexit or Northern Ireland. Or parole. Other times they speak more directly about the demands of marriage. Like some other recent conjugal comedies, including “Catastrophe” and “Divorce,” “State” treats marriage and children more as a root cause of its characters’ troubles than as a solution to them.

“We have kids and we have a mortgage and we have your mum and my mum and we have the school run and we have work and no work,” Louise says in a late episode. “I mean how can you not get ground down by it?”

Hornby wouldn’t say — at least not directly — if he had ever seen a marriage counselor. (“I’m divorced, so I invite you to draw your own conclusions,” he said, laughing.) But he has a dialogue-lover’s belief that talking things out can help. Keeping Tom and Louise in the pub both justifies the brief running time and gets them to engage with each other unmediated.

“It felt like you could get a rawer slice of marriage that way,” he said.

Not one to let a good chat go to waste, he has adapted the teleplays into what he calls “a novel in dialogue,” also titled “State of the Union.” Riverhead Books plans to release it on May 7.

Although Tom and Louise see the counselor only once a week, executives at SundanceTV decided to parcel out the episodes a little faster. Starting Monday, Sundance TV will roll out one of its 10 episodes every weekday for two weeks at 10 p.m. Also starting Monday, the network’s streaming platform, Sundance Now, and its website, SundanceTV.com, will unlock two episodes each day at 5 p.m.

Hornby already has an idea for a second season of “State of the Union”: same format, different couple. But is creating another microformat series just indulging our waning attention spans?

“Almost certainly,” Hornby said, laughing. He joked that in 20 years, “‘State of the Union’ will be held up as the Golden Age of long-form drama.”

“The way we’re going,” he said, “we’ll all be watching things that are one minute long.”