NEW YORK — In August 2000, a Time magazine cover story touting singles life displayed Sarah Jessica Parker and her three “Sex and the City” co-stars with the headline: “Who Needs a Husband?”
That question could apply, in spades, to Parker’s new HBO comedy, a piercingly honest yet droll exploration of a marriage on the rocks titled, brazenly, “Divorce.”
Premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT, “Divorce” returns Parker to series TV in a role that will inevitably be judged against her “Sex and the City” portrayal as self-described “sexual anthropologist” Carrie Bradshaw.
But, odds are, only fleetingly. “Divorce” reintroduces the actress as Frances, a suburban wife and mother gazing into the bathroom mirror in the series’ first scene as if to wish away encroaching signs of age, whereupon husband Robert (co-star Thomas Haden Church) interrupts to beef about how Frances hogs the bathroom.