Like This, but Funnier

DEBUT Caroline is a television script writer between gigs. Her husband, Harry, is a therapist who is ready for parenthood. Caroline is more conflicted about children, as she imagines herself falling down the “mommy hole” of a child-centered existence. Instead, she focuses her attention on a project that comes her way, called A Bartender’s Guide to Living, Laughing, and Dying Alone. While she feels no love for the story, she enhances her pitch with confidential details from notes she found in Harry’s desk about a patient he calls “the Teacher.” In his notes, the special needs teacher confesses to dreams in which she harms the demanding parents of her students. To Caroline’s intense discomfort, those are the details that get her pitch green-lighted. At every step of the project’s development, Caroline tries to sabotage it while sinking ever deeper into the quagmire of questionable morality.