The first season of Divorce, which aired on HBO in 2016, was a dark show, and not just in the metaphorical sense. The color palette of the comedy was so suffused that many times, when watching it on my laptop, I was moved to turn up my screen brightness only to find that it was already at maximum level. The gloom hanging around the series was there for a reason; it was as if intended to diminish Sarah Jessica Parker’s plucky brightness, a planned dourness that would, once and for all, mark a permanent split between the actress and her former HBO alter-ego, Carrie Bradshaw. Where Carrie was all pink tutus and giant hothouse flower pins, Frances Dufresne, Parker’s staunch character on Divorce, wore the modest, minimalist uniform of a wealthy mom: long dresses in cornflower blue and maroon, grey stockings, and tidy ankle boots in lieu of bedazzled stilettos.

When Divorce premiered, Parker had not been on HBO in twelve years, and yet, as she admitted in a New York Times profile, fans still saw her—and may forever see her—as synonymous with Bradshaw, clomping her way across Manhattan cobblestones with a shellac of wit and self-regard. “But it was definitely acting,” she told The Times. “I never lived any of those experiences in my own life. I’m not Carrie.” Divorce may have been a calculated career move to make this distinction clear. And it did work: Frances is suburban in ways that would make Carrie squirm in her Manolos. Frances was married for two decades, she has two teenage children, and she lives not in a Manhattan brownstone but a creaky wooden house in Hastings-on-Hudson, a tony Westchester suburb 45 minutes north of midtown on the Metro-North line.

If anything, the first season of Divorce presented this bas relief a little too well; it was, decidedly, not a romp. If Sex and the City was a fizzy vodka cocktail, then Divorce was a bitter aperitif. It sprung from the mind of Sharon Horgan, the canny creator of the charming, messy British sitcom Pulling, and, more recently, the Amazon series Catastrophe, which manages to play off the doldrums of married life for high comedy. With both Horgan and Parker on board, along with the droll bravado of Thomas Haden Church as Frances’s soon-to-be-ex Robert, the show should have had more lightness, it should have bounded through its jokes. Instead, it beat up its leading players, and by extension, its audience.

The erasure of Carrie Bradshaw was complete, but it left a grey vacuum of misery in her place.

Divorce is never a concept brimming with joy. Most separations, even the peaceful ones, are deeply unpleasant, full of paperwork and pettiness and pain—but the first season of Divorce had a distinct brand of joylessness that made it difficult to stomach. As Frances, who initiates the decline of her souring union by entering into an affair with a weaselly art history professor, Parker grimaces her way through most of the episodes, slumping through her scenes. Haden Church, on the other hand, plays Robert as a violent cartoon, a cocksure contractor whose fragile masculinity explodes into petulant retaliation. He bellows while Parker mewls, struts while she shrinks. The talented supporting cast of (wealthy, white) friends tossed into this melee—Molly Shannon, Talia Balsam, Tracy Letts—all do their best to keep up with the duo’s central ugliness, but they were never given large enough roles to thaw the ice at the show’s center.

At the end of season one, Frances and Robert have hired bulldog lawyers. Robert has callously involved the police, accusing Frances of kidnapping their children when she takes them on a ski vacation (that Robert previously approved). We leave Frances screaming by the side of the road, yelling into a phone that Robert should prepare to lose everything he loves. The erasure of Carrie Bradshaw was complete, but it left a grey vacuum of misery in her place.

