You can probably tell how long they've been a couple by the casualness with which two people ask each other about their digestion.

So it's not at all the inevitable fundamental dispute over a trivial potato question that overshadows the journey home of Ian (Sean Bean) and Emma (Nicola Walker) from a holiday together.

Emma didn't ask if the airport diner had baked potatoes, which Ian liked better than fries;

Ian, seriously disgruntled: “This isn't about baked potatoes.

If you had asked me, I would have asked.”

So it's not at all this bitterly funny start to the fascinatingly honestly told BBC series "Marriage", which shows that we are dealing with a married couple who have been steeled by countless crises that have been passed together, but the fact that the The argument that soon turned into insults seems to be completely forgotten and forgiven in the next shot.

Ian and Emma lumber into their quintessentially English family home (even the carpet on the stairs), rummage through the mail, ask about digestion (“goes like that”) and then slouch undignified on the sagging couch in front of the TV.

The catastrophes will no longer be much bigger than the potato quarrel, but a little.

You can sense the trembling inside

The four episodes that are now being shown on Magenta TV were conceived, written and shot by Stefan Golaszewski, who in turn has had plenty of experience with regard to subtle sitcoms about the little dramas of everyday life in British brick suburbs.

'Him & Her' (2010-2013, BBC) was about a reclusive young couple who found happiness in intimate video nights.

"Mum" (2016-2019, BBC) was about the normally crazy life of a widowed woman.

Everything stands and falls in these risky unspectacular intimate comedies with the actors.

It is all the more important that Golaszewski was able to win two heavyweights for his new project in Nicola Walker and Sean Bean.

Walker has already shone in numerous British television series: "Spooks", "River", "Babylon", "Collateral".

Sean Bean, on the other hand, has played dozens of believable characters in addition to roles in The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones;

among the most impressive are Pastor Kerrigan in the BBC series Broken and prisoner Mark in the BBC series Time, both penned by Jimmy McGovern.

In addition, five (so far) sometimes turbulent marriages also qualify him for the role of the slightly deranged husband who tries bravely to doggedly to smile away at private setbacks.

Even the smallest scenes are played by these actors in such a nuanced way that you can sense a trembling inside them, even if the tremors hardly come to the surface.

Ian, who can hardly channel his aimless anger and sadness (he recently lost his mother and job), complains about dirty elevators or talks slightly intrusively to a young employee at his gym.

Bean excels in scenes that evoke an almost physical uneasiness in the viewer.

Emma, ​​who seems accustomed to dealing with self-pitying men—her father (James Christopher Golam) is a bitter patriarch but is nevertheless lovingly cared for by her—remains painfully defensive, at best insisting she had done nothing wrong.