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" &amp;quot;I can do banal shit all day long if there&amp;#039;s a little love there, or happiness, but there isn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; So says Sarah Jessica Parker&amp;#039;s Frances of her ailing marriage, inadvertently summing up the problem with HBO&amp;#039;s acerbic anti-comedy Divorce. This is a show about banal people and the banal things they do to one another, and it&amp;#039;d be easier to handle if there was a bit more humanity or warmth in the mix. As it is, its half-hour episodes feel endless, and you&amp;#039;re left wondering why you&amp;#039;re spending time with the kind of miserable people you&amp;#039;d avoid at a party.  Creator Shannon Horgan is best known for Amazon&amp;#039;s widely beloved comedy Catastrophe, which is an amiable, ramshackle show about marriage\u2014naturally, then, her follow-up is an alienating and stiff show about divorce. Frances realizes that she no longer loves her husband Robert (Thomas Haden Church), after attending a hellish 50th birthday party for her friend Diane (Molly Shannon); an evening laced with simmering resentment that culminates in Diane threatening her husband Nick (Tracy Letts) with a gun.         &amp;quot;Sometimes I actually feel happy, and then I see your car in the driveway and my heart sinks,&amp;quot; Frances tells a bewildered Robert, in one of the pilot&amp;#039;s more effectively brutal moments. Trying to change her mind, he demands the chance to give her an orgasm, and as she stiffly declines his offer you realize just how far we are tonally from Parker&amp;#039;s last HBO show. The sex here is much more Hannah Horvath than Carrie Bradshaw\u2014even Frances&amp;#039; affair with Julian (Jemaine Clement), a chisel-jawed college professor who makes his own granola, is pretty joyless.  We know well that TV characters don&amp;#039;t need to be likable\u2014the more anti-heroic the better, in many cases\u2014but they do need to be interesting in their flaws, and it&amp;#039;s here that Divorce falls down. Parker is not the engaging lead we expect and there&amp;#039;s only so much she can do with a flimsy character like Frances, who lacks even the courage of her own convictions. After Julian responds poorly to her news, she tries to backtrack and stay with Robert, only to be kicked out of the house herself when he discovers her infidelity. It&amp;#039;s a bleak little full circle that leaves nobody worth rooting for.  What does feel fresh about Divorce&amp;#039;s treatment of its subject is the emphasis on financial peril\u2014this is a process that&amp;#039;s not just painful, but extremely expensive, even for people living a seemingly aspirational life in upstate New York. Talia Balsam is another highlight as Frances&amp;#039;s friend Dallas, an acid-tongued divorc\u00E9e who&amp;#039;s seen it all and has no damns left to give. Watching her cut through the BS makes Divorce more tolerable, but stilted dialogue and a cynical tone will make this a tough sell even for hardened HBO devotees.  Divorce debuts Sunday, October 9 at 10pm on HBO.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/reviews/a18158/sarah-jessica-parker-divorce-hbo-review/>