This post was originally published on this site

Party Coverage: Scene City

By ALEX WILLIAMS

There was Sarah Jessica Parker (“Sex and the City”) huddling with Matthew Broderick (“Election”), as guests tucked into plates of pumpkin agnolotti by Mario Batali (Babbo) and bantered about the latest Clinton White House run.

There was also Dana Delany (“China Beach”) chatting with Karen Duffy (Duff, from MTV), as Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” played overhead.

At the Tuesday premiere of the HBO series “Divorce” — which brought together Cynthia Nixon (“Sex and the City”), Molly Shannon (“Saturday Night Live”) and Jerry Seinfeld (uh, “Seinfeld”) — it was easy to conclude that La Sirena, Mr. Batali’s newest restaurant in Chelsea, had slipped into some kind of time warp and landed in the 1990s. All that was missing were the clinking cosmopolitans.

But take a closer look. On this placid fall evening, the erstwhile Carrie Bradshaw was all grown up, and dressed in a jeweled Dolce & Gabbana gown that Nan Kempner might have worn to the Met Ball.

Similarly, “Divorce,” her much-anticipated HBO comeback, which premieres on Sunday, is a dark comedy about middle-age suburbanites trying to stay afloat in crumbling marriages, not oversexed Manhattanites surfing their way through their 30s.

Ms. Parker, now a 51-year-old mother of three, said “Divorce” is a far cry from the youthful “Sex and the City” frothiness.

“This is a portrait of a marriage and an attempt at divorce, and most people are not equipped to divorce well,” she said. “We don’t do it a lot. Most of us don’t come with the tools to always be civilized and gracious and generous and magnanimous.”

Ms. Shannon, whose plays Diane, a slightly unhinged friend of Ms. Parker’s character, Frances, gets no shortage of laugh lines. But she, too, said the show has a serious message.

“With divorce, you’re really trading one problem for another gigantic problem: How do you unravel a marriage, financially, in terms of custody?” she said at the pre-party screening held at the SVA Theater in Chelsea. “In the movies, it’s like, ‘I want a divorce!’ without really knowing what that entails.”

Heavy stuff, certainly. But judging by the laughs that Episode 1 was getting, “Divorce” is a lot more fun than, you know, divorce.

“It was hilarious,” said Olivia Newton-John, who was talking at the party with a flannel-shirt clad Kenny Loggins at the far end of the bar. “Anyone who’s been through a divorce can relate to certain parts. I laughed a lot, and I felt compassion, too.”

Certainly, a just-for-yuks take on infidelity, anger and marital resentment may strike many television executives as a risky bet. But Richard Plepler, the HBO chief executive, said he placed full confidence in Ms. Parker.

“You can hear the knowing giggles in the room,” he said. “Those giggles were, ‘There’s truth on that screen.’”

Even so, it seems very likely that the fashion-obsessed urbanites who came of age asking “Are you more of a Carrie or a Samantha?” will follow Ms. Parker wherever she leads them.

That is a point not lost on the cast itself. A lot of the people who watched ‘Sex and the City’ back in the ’90s went out, hooked up and got married, said Dean Winters, a veteran of the ’90s prison drama “Oz,” who plays a therapist in “Divorce.” “And they are probably now getting divorced.”