Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan Are Nervous and Sad About Ending ‘Catastrophe’, Too

What is there to say about Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, the creators, writers, and stars of Catastrophe? Or, what I learned is even more challenging, what is there to say TO the duo besides praise and thank you and more praise for gifting us with four seasons of a show that is equal parts lovely and filthy and heartbreaking and hilarious. After all, the half-hour comedy on Amazon, which returns for its fourth and final season today, is pretty much unequivocally loved and enjoyed by everyone who’s watched it. Well, almost.

“2016 BAFTA voters?” Delaney offers up as one group that might hold a varying opinion of the brilliance of this show, and the joke earns big laughs from everyone in the downtown New York City hotel suite where I met the duo this week on a sunny afternoon during their final press tour for the series. They’re relaxed and warm and engaging as they sat comfortably on the hotel room couch, even after being subjected to questions (and many of the same ones at that) all day.

Horgan and Delaney star as Sharon and Rob, a couple that fell in love the same way they fell into parenting: kind of by accident and with plenty of bumps along the way. There are much fewer bumps when it comes to the reaction of this show (you know, minus those very incorrect BAFTA voters), even on a place as negative as Twitter. Horgan’s even noticed that fellow writer/performer pals on the platform will “plug it and sometimes they don’t even put our names in it. So they’re not like, hey look what I’m doing, they’re genuinely asking people to watch the show.” And it’s those same writer/performer types who aren’t simply tagging for attention, so few of which have ever been met with the same positivity and enthusiasm for their projects as Horgan and Delaney have, that have even managed to not let their jealousy get the best of them.

“When you get to the big leagues, people are kind of nice, at least to your face,” Delaney agreed. “But people are pretty nice because they might as well be. Like, if I was walking down the street and I heard somebody say something not nice about Pamela Adlon’s show Better Things, I’d go across the street and slap ’em. And I’d expect her to do the same.”

So if people are enjoying your show so much, why end it? Well, a couple of reasons. One, UK TV shows seem to have a much more sensible idea of how long a series should go on, in that four seasons is more than enough. It’s us gluttonous Americans that expect a TV show, especially ones with characters we love and feel connected to, to live on forever and ever because we can’t imagine our lives before or after them (spoiler alert: we’ll be okay).

The other reason Catastrophe is coming to an end is that it felt like the right time for Horgan and Delaney. “We didn’t want to overdo it,” Delaney explained. “We’ve said what we wanted to say and we just didn’t want to scramble to put together episodes. We established our thesis, we expressed it, and supported it.”

Horgan added, “It was a really gorgeous, fun show to do and I will genuinely miss playing that character and I’ll genuinely miss us writing together and writing all of those characters and spending time with them. It doesn’t necessarily feel good, it makes me feel sad.”

“And nervous. It might be the wrong decision,” Delaney confessed.

“I think the sense that we were able to end it in a way that made us feel happy and exactly how we wanted to is a plus reason because that doesn’t always happen,” Horgan said.

Delaney continued to reflect on the process by saying, “At the end of every other season I’ve thought, oh we didn’t get to say this, we didn’t get to say that. And at the end of this one I wasn’t like, oh but if only we could’ve… I was like, that’s alright.”

But this is 2019 after all, the era of the reboot. So while the fourth and final season of Catastrophe has been available to stream for mere hours, what better time to start wishing for a reboot, right?

“We certainly could, although it would also be funny to not do it since there are shows rebooting where I’m like, really?” Delaney said, adding, “It would be fun and perverse to not reboot a show that people really wanted.”

For Horgan it’s less about Delaney’s valid urge to mess with viewers and instead much more about the content. “There would have to be such a great story idea,” she said in regards to bringing her back to Catastrophe. “A show I did in the UK called Pulling, the 10 year anniversary of it came around and so we were approached to do an anniversary special. Dennis Kelly and I who wrote it, we got together a few times; we love the show and genuinely wanted to have a think about it. It’s not like we couldn’t think of anything but we couldn’t think of anything good enough to do that. So we would both have to think we had the greatest bunch of stories to tell and the greatest reason for doing it, otherwise it’s just a bit embarrassing, isn’t it?”

Much less embarrassing, both for the creators and the admiring viewers, is how honest and relatable the show proves to be in every episode, connecting with viewers not only in the UK and US, but plenty of other countries around the globe (Delaney noted that Spain is the top non-English speaking country for the series). “We get told, ‘That is me,’ more than anything else,” Horgan stated. “It’s a constant refrain. Do you have cameras in my house, kind of thing.” She said fans specifically point to the raw language the couple use when arguing as a real highlight, but takes it only as a compliment. “That’s great because that’s what we strive for, to create stories and scenarios that feel completely relatable and believable. We never want it to be removed or heightened because that’s the reason it’s done well, people see themselves in it.”

Delaney’s also heard, “I wish my spouse would do the thing where Rob yelled at the girl in line at the movies.” But the finale of this season had some viewers questioning their judgement just a bit. “The argument where Rob really lays into Sharon, a lot of people got very angry at that and they’re like, oh, I guess Rob’s a sociopath.”

But it’s this exact quality that makes the characters so beautifully flawed, and the way Catastrophe celebrates that. And while the fate of (most of) the show’s couples is decided in these last six episodes, Horgan and Delaney weren’t afraid to pull from some of their own on-screen favorites for inspiration. As Delaney recalled,”Something I thought about when we were making this show, and remember we talked about maybe somebody’s in jail or something in the earliest incarnation of what we were ever gonna do together? My couple I was insane about in Chicago Hope, Mandy Patinkin and his wife who lived in the mental hospital and he would sometimes go in and play the piano for all the patients and she would sing along and they would be happy together in their weird world, that couple made me fucking weep.”

Horgan’s hopes and dreams hung on a popular movie franchise relationship. “The Before/After Linklater series of films, I feel like that last scene… I watched it again recently on the way back from somewhere and they do have a similar kind of moment which is a if-we-hadn’t-met kind of thing. But if those two had split up, I mean, it’s also left slightly ambiguously, but that I think would’ve upset me. I hate the idea of them not being together.”

She also pointed to an ’80s classic, saying, “I think I really wanted at the end of Tootsie for those two characters to get together. They couldn’t just be friends. At least have a go.”

“And Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra,” Delaney added, as he was met with laughter. So he clarified, “I’m totally not kidding. That’s like my favorite thing I’ve ever, ever seen.”

Fans of Catastrophe will enjoy the addition of two characters for the final season, Michaela Watkins as Rob’s sister Sydney, and her new boyfriend Pat, played by Nat Faxon. And if the group really, really feels like family, there’s a good reason for that. “What was really great for me and made me feel really at home shooting it,” Delaney said, “Is that I know both of them and we’re all from the same little corner of Massachusetts, as is Mitchell Mullen, the guy that plays my dad. So it was a snap-on, instant, for real Boston family.” Getting the two actors for the role turned out to be as simple as, “We asked them, and thank god they were able to do it. And they know each other so I think it is good that literally by happenstance we got a bunch of people that really were from there.”

“We couldn’t believe how well that whole family came together,” Horgan admitted. “It was just a pleasure to hang around with them, apart from just loving their work and what they do, they’re equally good at comedy and drama and all that. But they’re just really lovely, nice people to hang around with.”

“Because seriously, how dare we introduce important characters in the final episode of the final season?” Delaney continued. “So good thing it jelled or that would’ve been a mess.”

In fact, it’s a wonder neither he nor Horgan are even more of a mess at this point in their exhaustive press tour, considering it’s also an elongated goodbye to a project they’ve not only spent years working on, but also seem to like, care for, and enjoy it the same way viewers do, free of cynicism or frustration. And even though the final season aired in the UK in January, Horgan revealed she’s actually enjoying this last round of questioning and gabbing about the show. “It’s the best. It’s honestly keeping me together.”

“Yeah, because otherwise it would’ve been too jarring of a fall off a cliff experience,” Delaney agreed.

“I’m nervous to get to the end of this,” she said.

“Oh, definitely. I think I’m gonna go to Canada, whether Canadians like it or not,” Delaney stated. It’s a safe bet to guess they’ll like it a lot — especially if they’ve ever seen Catastrophe.

Where to stream Catastrophe