Trophy Wife: Season 1 (2013)

The short-lived Trophy Wife undoubtedly takes its cues from Modern Family – in some ways, it’s like what Modern Family would look like if it was condensed to a single family. Apart from a few regular side characters, it revolves around Kate (Malin Akerman) who marries Pete (Bradley Whitford), only to discover that he has two previous wives, Jackie (Jane Seymour) and Diane (Marcia Gay Harden), as well as three children. The children, in particular, aren’t that far removed from the precocious eccentricity of Modern Family, but that and the show’s general premise are where the similarities end, since Trophy Wife is far more assured about being a sitcom, or at least less anxious to continually prove that it’s more than a sitcom. In part, that’s because it’s populated with such a charismatic cast – one of the joys of the recent Golden Age of Television is the opportunity to experience the domestic, televisual intimacy with big-screen, big-budget actors that characterised television in the 1960s and 1970s. And Trophy Wife feels like a paean to Marcia Gay Harden – Diane’s icy distance is never quite punctured or domesticated enough to allow us to get over the frisson of seeing Harden in such a quotidian vehicle, just as Kate never quite gets used to seeing Diane around her house, or in a domestic context. By the same token, the film draws heavily on Akerman’s indie and frathouse pedigree – she’s always had a fantastic comic presence that seemed to exceed whatever film it was placed in, and here she is given a chance to really spread her wings as a comic actress; her timing is immaculate, almost subliminal, and holds the show in a kind of uneasy, queasy comic tension that makes everything feel a little bit provisional. Like most great comic actors, her face never feels quite comfortable, or quite still, just as Kate’s never quite at home in her new life as a third wife – and the series as a whole is driven by every character’s discomfort with the premise; nobody can quite get used to it, which is perhaps why it feels natural that it would end after a single season. Sitcoms often put the propinquity back into domesticity, the contingency back into intimacy, but rarely with as much joy and conviction as Trophy Wife – unlike Modern Family, this family never feels complete, never curbs its sprawl into other, weirder ways of being together.