Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
6 - Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
A pivotal scene occurs early on in the first series of Catastrophe (2015–). Rob (Rob Delaney) floats the idea that he and new partner Sharon (Sharon Horgan) should relocate from London to Boston in the US. The move is logical. As Rob observes, living in Boston is ‘cheaper by probably about, 500%’, and given that his employers are increasingly sceptical of his plans to create a European office, his career prospects in advertising appear to be more secure in Massachusetts than they are in Greater London. None the less, a cut to Sharon's disgusted facial expression reveals that she is appalled by the very idea. ‘Once you graduate to a city like London or New York, you don't regress to Boston,’ she explains. Dismissing Rob's concerns about his unemployment, Sharon affirms that the couple will ‘sort it out here’. The audience thus understands that Catastrophe, its characters and its (anti-) romantic narrative can be located only in London, the quintessential global city. This chapter examines how love across the Atlantic, as embodied by Sharon and Rob's budding relationship, is mediated through its London setting. As I demonstrate, romance is increasingly viewed as a pragmatic, rather than idealised, solution to precarity in contemporary culture. In Catastrophe, this is made manifest through both characters’ – and especially Rob's – troubled relationship to their urban environs. Examining the show's mobilisation of discourses of authenticity, realism and ‘quality’ television itself, this chapter considers why the show is set in the areas around London Fields, in the borough of Hackney. In the context of increasingly transatlantic models of television distribution, I argue that the show's use of a globalised East London speaks to a transnational and upmarket aesthetic that is modelled on the types of urban locales made visible in Catastrophe.
Crossing the Atlantic, Crossing Genres
Catastrophe is the fruit of a relationship forged across the Atlantic between Sharon Horgan, a London-born Irishwoman who co-wrote the less popular (though much admired) Pulling (2006–9) and Dead Boss (2012), and Rob Delaney, an American stand-up comedian dubbed ‘the funniest person on Twitter’ (Erickson 2012).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 106 - 120Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020