When the third season of Amazon’s hit comedy Catastrophe debuts on Friday, it will reintroduce audiences to the propulsive charm and wit of Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan. They’re the hilariously bawdy co-creators, co-stars and faux couple at the center of a show about how it can sometimes be right for the wrong people to get together.
The new season, though, will also be one of the last projects fans get to enjoy from the late Carrie Fisher, the Hollywood icon who had a small role on the show, and who died tragically in December after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles.
Get your handkerchiefs ready. It aired earlier this week in the UK, and the final TV appearance by Fisher — who played Mia, Rob’s impossible-to-please mother — sent tweeters across the pond into collective mourning, their reactions to the finale coupled with sentimental hashtags like #WeMissYouCarrie.
Horgan spent some quiet time with Fisher the night before her London-to-LA flight and recalled in an interview with BGR how tough it was to later be in the editing room and see Fisher alive again, playing Rob’s sharp-tongued, boundary-pushing mother.
“It happened so quickly that it didn’t real feel at all,” Horgan tells BGR. “We had such a wonderful time with her, professionally and personally. It really felt like we got to know her. She came to my house, and we hung out and talked a lot. She was someone I was really grateful to have in my life, and then suddenly for her to not be around anymore … it felt surreal. And then having to go into the edits and see her being so very alive on screen … It’s such a wonderful performance she gives in our final episode.
“It was really tough (to lose her), there’s no two ways about it. We just thank our lucky stars we got to have her in our lives for a short time.”
Fans of the show feel the same way. That Fisher and Catastrophe ended up in Amazon’s lap at all is a testament to how far the company’s streaming service has come as it continues to assert itself as a formidable player in the Internet TV wars.
The show first aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. before getting picked up by Amazon, which makes it available as part of its video offerings to
Analysts at JPMorgan think Amazon is set to shell out $4.5 billion this year, bringing its content budget closer to Netflix’s $6 billion for 2017. And the company wants more than just TV shows. Amazon and the NFL have also inked a $50 million deal for the company to stream 10 Thursday night football games, per The Wall Street Journal.
Horgan, meanwhile, says the Catastrophe team has felt an abundance of support from Amazon that’s helped get the show about modern love, relationships, parenting and family out to more people than might otherwise have gotten to see it. The Emmy-nominated show, she says, has been successful because it’s about “real life” and the way people deal with the messy parts of being in love and part of a family.
“Amazon has been really supportive of us,” Horgan said. “We’re just a little UK show they got on board with very, very early. I mean, we’d only just made a pilot. As far as we were concerned — we weren’t expecting to get noticed. There’s so many shows out there, so many U.S.-born shows and imported shows. So, yeah, it’s not on a network — not everyone has access to it — but the visibility they’ve given to us, it feels like it really helps give the show a life. And people seem to find it … It’s nuts. We still pinch ourselves that this happened.”
