Sarah Jessica Parker returns as our favorite ‘Sex and the City’ character in a completely new body — this time as drama comedy protagonist, Frances Dufresne.

While the first season was full of twists and turns, it ended a bit too soon for fans of the show. However last night, ‘Divorce’ premiered the first episode of its second season — right where it left off with Robert at the end of the line. Coincidentally, the show’s timeline aligned right with the inauguration of Donald Trump.

The episode starts off with Frances and Robert a year later — they’re dating now and trying to find compromise in parenting their kids. Lila Dufresne, the separated couple’s daughter, hates her mom and wants to live with her dad, Robert while Tom, their son, doesn’t have too much of an opinion on the subject.

To reconcile with them both, Frances buys them a trampoline — you can probably imagine how well that went.

But I’m glad the writers are giving the children more screen time — divorces affect kids as much as their parents and it was refreshing to see the pair not just looking blankly ahead while Frances and Robert battled it out. It was also nice to see the difference in personalities the two had — Lila’s snarkiness and hatred vs Tom’s obvious indifference.

On Robert’s end, it’s going about the same — he starts dating Jackie, a very young real estate agent, and shaves his beloved mustache. The episode never really fully combs through his residual anger from the separation. This is probably one of the parts of the show when drama and comedy have to battle it out for the spotlight.

The other characters in the show also seem to be evolving — Diane, a well-off housewife, attempts to broaden her identity from just being married to her husband. She invests in Frances’ gallery which is still basically unknown.

Dallas is also being used as a non-essential character — while she’s trying to not sleep with her usual unappealing guy of choice, Dallas is mainly used as a friend and listener for Frances and her problems.

‘Divorce’ seems to be wanting to be taken in another direction. Due to the main conflict being solved in the first season, there really isn’t anything else to discuss other than moving on. And while the writers could go with that plotline, it wouldn’t make for a very interesting or suspenseful second season.

A potentially interesting character is Sylvia, the new artist that Frances meets — she could be the bridge to introducing social issues that the Dufresnes’ are definitely not exposed to, being the middle class white family they are.

Other than that, the writers better have a killer next couple of episodes to keep me interested. If they don’t, it’s really just a show about a mediocre white couple with a bad marriage.

Amber Wang is a freelance writer for Popdust. She also writes for other sites such as Gearbrain and Trueself, along with being a student at NYU.

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