Stream It Or Skip It: ‘State Of The Union’ On Sundance, Where A Married Couple Talks Before Going To Counseling

Marriage counseling is always fraught with finger-pointing, emotional outbursts, denials and hard truths. But the truth of a couple’s relationship might be seen in the minutes before they get to the therapist’s office, whether they’re driving there together or meeting beforehand at a designated spot. There’s a lot of game-planning, a lot of reviewing what happened the previous week, and a lot of deep dives into what’s going wrong. Nick Hornby captures those minutes before those emotional sessions in State of the Union, a show where each episode only lasts ten minutes. Read on for more….

STATE OF THE UNION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear a pen tapping on a table, then see a man in a pub working on a newspaper crossword puzzle. A pint of beer and a glass of white wine are on the table. Then a woman comes in and sits at the table.

The Gist: Tom (Chris O’Dowd) and Louise (Rosamund Pike) have been together for 15 years, and have two kids. But when they meet at the pub there’s definitely an iciness between them. They’re meeting before their first marriage counseling appointment, trying to figure out what to talk about and what direction the discussions should take. The counseling was definitely Tom’s idea, though Louise seems to be more into it by the time they’re pre-gaming the first session.

Tom suggested counseling after he found out that Louise had an affair with a co-worker. To Tom, that’s the problem they’re going to therapy to discuss. But to Louise, her infidelity was just the culmination of a bunch of problems that built to that point, not the least of which is that the two of them stopped having sex. Her goal is to break down all of those little steps so they can get at the crux of the problem.

Tom is upset when he finds out that the therapist is a woman, blaming feminism. “You had an affair, but I’ll get the blame, because of mitigating circumstances.”

Our Take: State of the Union has an interesting format: Each of the ten episodes are about ten minutes long, and each of them show what Louise and Tom talk about in the pub ten minutes before their weekly counseling appointment. We don’t see the sessions themselves; all of the story information is communicated in that pub and during the one-minute walk across the street to the therapist’s office. The only other characters are a battling couple the first five episodes and an older couple the second five; both are the appointment before Tom and Louise, and they spend time speculating about what’s going on in those couples’ marriages. Each episode is all dialogue with the only scene change being the exit from the pub.

Nick Hornby, who wrote the series and co-produces it with Stephen Frears (who also directed all the episodes), needed to impart all the information in this limited format without making the episodes seem too phony or stagey. The first episode doesn’t quite reach that goal, as it feels like Louise and Tom are two people talking about someone else’s marriage rather than a married couple in crisis. Not that Pike and O’Dowd aren’t up to the challenge; it’s just that it’s hard to establish the two of them as a long-term couple until we’re at least a couple of episodes into the season, and some more of their history is revealed.

The game-planning that goes on in those minutes before a couple goes to counseling, though, is true-to-life, as is how we hear each session went awry when Tom and Louise meet at the pub the following week. The best episodes are when a particular topic that seems like it’s completely unrelated spirals into a referendum on Louise and Tom’s marriage, like when Tom reveals he voted for Brexit or when Tom’s complaints about having to do the crossword on a printout leads to a discussion on why he moved out.

By the end of the ten episodes, Hornby has done a good job of completing a satisfying arc for Louise and Tom, helped along by the wry, funny performances from Pike and O’Dowd.

Sex and Skin: Tom wants to know how many times Louise had sex with the person she had an affair with, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: In the walk across the street from the pub to the therapist’s office, Tom wants to talk more about whether he’s OK with the therapist being a woman. Louise just wants to go in. But a scared Tom just runs down the street, flinging the newspaper away as he does it.

Sleeper Star: We want to just sit in that pub across the street from the therapist’s office all day. It just looks so calm and inviting.

Most Pilot-y Line: “There’s the long and the complicated, and then there’s… as the crow flies,” Tom after Louise tells him it was a long and complicated road to get to that point. This is an example of how the first episode or so is more stagey than natural.

Our Call: STREAM IT. State of the Union might hit close to home for you if you’ve ever been through couples’ counseling, but Hornby’s writing and the performances of O’Dowd and Pike will make you feel happy you hung in with Louise and Tom.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream State of the Union on Sundance