, which Horgan co-starred in as Bea’s older sister. “Sharon can make any character more nuanced and grounded, and as a writer her notes are impeccable,” Bea tells me. “She can always spot the dusty gold coin in the pot of old coppers. That is a metaphor which I am sure she would have been able to improve.”
In her own scripts, Horgan never settles for the surface, eschewing generic cliche for nailed-down truth, and it’s often autobiographical. Motherland – she co-wrote seasons one and two, its peak era – was unsparing in its depiction of exhausted mothers, but it never slipped into “slummy mummy needs wine” stereotype. “God no, I hate that with a passion. It’s just of no interest to me,” she says with a curled lip.
She is, she says, not as tough as the characters in her sitcoms, and that’s true. I was expecting her to be prickly like Julia in Motherland, self-confident like Sharon in Catastrophe, maybe even a little cruel, like Donna in Pulling. Instead, she seems mainly anxious, peppering her conversation with self-deprecation and hesitant “um, y’know”s. She has the nervy energy of someone who has 17 things left on her to-do list and it’s five minutes to midnight.