Welcome to Your New Favorite Show: The Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce

Hello, Obsessed readers! Not sure if you remember me, but I was a blogger here about two years ago when Obsessed first came to be. I’m so excited to be back to live-tweet and recap Bravo’s first scripted series, The Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, every week! One thing you need to know about me is that I’m a diehard Bravo-aholic. I’m partial to every city of the Real Housewives, I can’t fall asleep until I know Andy Cohen’s “Jackhole” on Watch What Happens Live, and I’m a little too invested in the drama on Vanderpump Rules (Jax is just a yenta trying to break up Tom and Katie for fun, right? But I digress…). So when I heard that a scripted series was coming to Bravo, I was most definitely intrigued. And after watching GGTD, I can tell you that it really is a breath of fresh air in between all those cat fights and reunions—yet it has that fun, sassy, and no-holds-barred feel you expect from everything on Bravo!

So where do we start? GGTD reminds me of a cross between Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. Both were fresh and funny takes on women being ballsy, brassy, and independent. SATC focused on finding love, while Desperate Housewives was more about what to do (or not do) when the honeymoon/spark started to fade. But both shows gave women permission to talk about things that were seen as taboo (one-night stands, affairs, white lies you tell your partner and even yourself…the list goes on). I think GGTD is going to do the same—it touches on the hard-core reality of divorce and, of course, dating after said divorce in an open, honest, and hilarious way. Plus, whether you’re single, married, or divorced, you’ll be able to relate to the themes of being true to yourself and how to start over when anything in your life isn’t working. It takes guts to walk away and not everyone has the courage to do so.

So with that said, let’s get to the show! We get right into it on GGTD when we meet our heroine Abby McCarthy, played by the truly delightful Lisa Edelstein. (Does she age? She has not formed a single wrinkle since starring on House or, better yet, her time as Lauren, the girl who broke up Ben and Felicity!) She’s the author of the successful Girlfriends’ Guide series of books, in which she writes openly about her life as a happily married mother of two and gives life advice to her legions of fans. Except only half that sentence is true: She and her husband, Jake (played by the amazing Paul Adelstein a.k.a. Leo Bergen on Scandal!), are pretending they’re still together for the sake of the kids and Abby’s career. Jake reluctantly returns home each morning, so the kids have no idea he’s been out partying and sleeping around. Things are so tense that Jake and Abby passive-aggressively send venomous texts in front of the kids in lieu of fighting outright.

No one can know that Abby is on the verge of divorce, as that would hurt her book career and the brand she’s built around her happy home life. Yet she can no longer face her usual crew of cool, together moms who sorta remind me of a Regina George-led clique 20 years post-Plastics. So, Abby joins forces with the misfits of the mom circles a.k.a. the divorced moms. There’s Lyla (the always fantastic Janeane Garofalo) and Phoebe (the beautiful Beau Garrett), who break a few key things down for Abby:

1. They tip her off that Jake is dating a CW star who was born in 1989. The year Jake and Abby graduated from college.

*2. Maybe she should consider a boob job.

3 .She absolutely needs to get laid.*Let me just say that Lyla and Beau are interesting characters I look forward to seeing evolve in future episodes. You could say that Lyla is the “Miranda” of the group with her awesome one-liners and tinge of negativity toward everything in life. She tricks her husband into having some drinks after he drops off the kids. They end up sleeping together, and once he’s on his way home, she calls the cops to report a “drunk driver.” This is all part of her master plan to stop paying him alimony. I definitely did not see that coming, but it was an interesting way to set up that Lyla is deeper than just sarcasm and cigarettes. If Lyla is “Miranda,” then Phoebe is definitely our “Samantha.” She’s all about using her divorce for a sexual awakening. We learn a lot about this when she brings Lyla and Abby to an exclusive nightclub that is perfectly summed up as “hipster Disneyland.” It’s there that Phoebe reveals to Abby that she’s sometimes paid to be an escort by her ex-husband. Then, in her mission to get Abby laid, she leans over and kisses her—you know, in case Phoebe needs to “take matters into her own hands” in her mission to get Abby laid.

Now wouldn’t that be a twist if Abby and Phoebe ended up together? Instead, Abby catches the eye of the hot and way younger club manager, whom she goes home with. And that’s when sh-t gets real: Abby lives in a huge house—this guy has roommates who stay up all night playing video games. But this is also where we see how dating again is going to be a crazy wake-up call for Abby after being off the market for so long. After being talked into staying for the “younger man experience,” Abby slips and calls out her husband’s name—twice! Yikes, but at least the deed is done. As Abby says, it was good news that her “vagina was not dead—just in a coma.”

What happens next is what really made the show click for me and realize this isn’t just going to be a show about Abby testing out her newly awakened sexual prowess on different guys each week. We think up until this point that Jake was the one who had a midlife crisis and checked out of their marriage, so he could check into women half his age. But when Abby’s “younger man experience” causes her to get home even later than Jake, it’s revealed in a heartbreaking fight that Abby was the one who “cheated” first. I put that word in quotations because it turns out that she was caught having an emotional affair via email and swears there was nothing physical. This, of course, opens up a whole other convo about which one is actually worse: not getting what you need physically or emotionally. Just because there’s no “touching” does that make it any less wrong or hurtful? Bring that one to brunch this weekend and let me know next week the consensus among your girlfriends!

This is the catalyst for everything to start crashing down for Abby and where the true heart of the show starts to beat—loudly. Her kids overhear the fight, and it turns out that the oldest daughter already knew that her parents were pretending to be together. With the “D” word finally allowed to be spoken out loud, Abby has to start accepting the reality of her new life as a single woman. Something she doesn’t handle so well when she shows up as a shell of herself at a book signing to launch her latest, The Girlfriends’ Guide to Getting Your Groove Back. Abby breaks down. She says the book is a “pile of horse sh-t” and with iPhone cameras rolling from every angle, she tells the crowd she’s watched her husband sleeping and thought that things would be so much easier if “he died.”

And from there this is the show we are tuning in to see each and every week! Next episode the fallout from Abby’s public meltdown begins, and I hope we’ll start to see how having her divorce out in the open will set Abby free. With her career crumbling down alongside her marriage, there’s a lot of juicy themes for GGTD to start addressing. How do you go from having it all to rebuilding it all? If you’ve been living a lie for this long, is it that easy to start living your truth? And can you ever get back the things you lost?

I can’t wait to get into all this and more with you every week. And I definitely want to know what you thought of episode one! Anything you particularly loved? Loathed? Do you think Bravo nailed it with its foray into scripted programming, or were you watching and wishing for a Brandi Glanville cameo the whole time?

Don’t forget I’ll be live-tweeting every Tuesday night at 10 P.M. ET from @LBAuthor with the hashtag #WatchWithGlamour and my recaps will be here every Wednesday morning too!