State of the Union review — Brendan Gleeson and Patricia Clarkson are a joy on BBC2

“You wanted to murder me?” a husband asks incredulously as he and his wife reflect on their 30 years together. “No, no. Of course not,” she reassures him. “I just wanted you to die.”

The Emmy award-winning comedy anthology series State of the Union returns for a second run with a new couple carrying out a vivisection on their marriage. As before, each episode revolves around the 10-minute window before a counselling session, but this time the action shifts from a pub in Hammersmith to a trendy café in Connecticut.

Much too trendy, it turns out, for cantankerous sixtysomething Scott (Brendan Gleeson), who is perplexed and irritated by the byzantine coffee menu and barista Jay’s (Esco Jouléy) indeterminate gender. He’s there to meet his recently estranged wife, Ellen (Patricia Clarkson), who wants more from her autumn years than to sit and watch civil war documentaries. As far as she’s concerned, entering couples’ therapy isn’t a means of fixing a relationship or putting the sex back in sexagenarian, but a way of streamlining the messy process of separation.

It’s easy at first to see why Ellen, spiritual and spirited, may want to leave the cynical, truculent Scott — a man who proclaims he’d rather give himself a lethal injection than try oat milk. More troubling than his intolerance of lactose intolerance or his general irascibility is his lack of interest in his wife, or indeed, anything that’s happened since 1975. For Ellen, he is that least desirable of combinations: both difficult and lacking in complexity.

“I’m more likeable than you think,” Scott retorts at one point. And to his credit, he’s right. While the show largely trades on the sharpness of its dialogue, scripted by the author Nick Hornby with a brilliant, metronomic rhythm, it doesn’t only use the characters as conduits for repartee. In 10 short episodes (set over 10 weeks), Scott makes sincere efforts to understand rather than rail against the world around him — one ethically-sourced coffee at a time. Ellen’s slightly sanctimonious progressiveness, meanwhile, is repeatedly undercut by the snap judgments she makes about Scott (and, indeed, Jay).

But State of the Union is too clever to let such personal growth and self-realisation pave the way for an easy, happy reconciliation. It recognises that talking, even candidly, may not be enough of a remedy for profound incompatibility or decades of disharmony. Still, watching the excellent Gleeson and Clarkson thrash it out is a joy nonetheless.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 from May 24 at 10pm and iPlayer thereafter; on Sundance TV in the US