Are you ready to seek counseling to improve your relationship? State of the Union, SundanceTV’s Emmy Award-winning short-form anthology series, is back for its second season. The first season focuses on Tom and Louise, played by Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike, and their unhappy marriage. Scott and Ellen, played by Brendan Gleeson and Patricia Clarkson, are another married couple who have sought counseling to repair their relationship. The comedy series is about couples who have very honest and intense talks about their relationships and how to be better husbands and wives. Each episode is about 10 minutes long and shows the couple’s conversations while they wait for their weekly couples’ therapy to start.
State of the Union Season 2 Episode 1 Release Date
State of the Union Season 2 Episode 1 will air on Valentine’s Day 2022 (Monday, February 14, 2022). On AMC Networks‘ streaming services Sundance Now and AMC+, all episodes will be available as a complete season.
State of the Union Season 201 Synopsis: Scott and Ellen meet for coffee to prepare for their first marital counseling session; Ellen makes a shocking announcement.
The 10-minute episodes of Season 2 are made up of 10 minutes of real-time talk. That meant Brendan Gleeson and Patricia Clarkson had to be conscious of their dialogue delivery speed. While writing season two, Nick Hornby admitted that he learned a lot about pronouns. Clarkson acknowledged that she admires Nick Hornby’s work and that she would gladly accept whatever he writes for her any day of the week.
“We were summoned to a kind of rapidity by our esteemed director who kept us within limits. But there was a kind of vitality and a drive in the writing anyway that kind of insisted on that. And it was exhilarating,” said Gleeson. “Yeah – and that’s exactly what it was. We knew these brilliant 10 minutes, we have to make the most of them. We have to cut to the chase. There’s no fat. There’s no wasted time,” said Clarkson. “It took on its own rhythm and Stephen made sure we kept in that rhythm. We love him.”
“I felt the same as Brendan, that I discovered a lot of things through the writing and then through talking to Esco,” said Hornby. “There was one line that Scott has in the script where he berates himself for getting a pronoun wrong and says, ‘Oh, Scott, you stupid old man.’ And that line came because somebody pointed out to me that I got a pronoun wrong and I said, ‘Oh, Nick, you stupid old man.’ And I thought I’ll just give that straight to Scott.” “Well, we had quite a few non-binary people on the set, assistants, and so we had to live off-screen what we were living on-screen,” added Clarkson. “And so, it was quite wonderful to all of us in a learning curve in London. So, it was helpful and quite remarkable at times.”
State of the Union Season 2 Per the official synopsis: Brendan Gleeson (The Tragedy of Macbeth, In Bruges), Patricia Clarkson (Sharp Objects), and Esco Jouléy (High Maintenance) star in the all-new adaptation of Nick Hornby’s award-winning short-form drama which cleverly explores relationships and the human experience. In this season, liberal campaigning Ellen (Clarkson) drags her traditional, self-made husband Scott (Gleeson) out of his comfort zone and into a hipster Connecticut coffee shop, where they have 10 minutes before their marriage counseling session to drink a coffee, gather their thoughts and argue about everything from Quakerism to pronouns. Each week, between the bickering, they begin to piece together what has gone wrong between them. As the weeks go by, they start to deconstruct their 30-year marriage. Past betrayals are aired, their sex life is re-examined, and their vulnerabilities are finally shared. By the end of 10 weeks of marital counseling, they’re not the same couple they used to be, but is making a change enough to save their marriage, or should they walk away?
Watch State of the Union Season 2 Official Trailer
It looks like Clarkson and Gleeson will have a lot of fun talking about everything from life in your early sixties to keeping up with the world’s changes to sex and monogamy to pronouns.
