"The storytelling is very, very different," Parker says. "I think there is not the same kind of buoyancy in this show that existed [in Sex and the City]. There is a wonderful frivolity that was important to Sex and the City that does not exist here."

And yet there is an immediate presumption from fans, and to some extent, the media, that this series, about a woman, Frances (Parker), coming to terms with the end of her marriage to Robert (Thomas Haden Church), is either a redux or an antidote to Sex and the City, in which Parker explored being single, living in New York and falling in (and out) love.

"We really didn't think about that being our burden," she says. "I think once we arrived and started talking about it I understood in advance that there would be that question."

Her character Frances is, she notes, "so strikingly different" to Carrie. "Her life, her choices, her surroundings, her economic place in the world, they're so different," she adds. "The colours on screen are so different, her relationship with a man, with clothing, with other human beings, with her friendships, it's a very different tone."

The series was created by Sharon Horgan, a British-born actress and writer whose credits include Absolute Power and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (as an actress), and Pulling, Angelo's and Catastrophe, with American comic Rob Delaney (as a writer).

When Divorce was offered to her, Parker had no reservations in returning to television.

"I love television, I love its limitations, I love its urgency," she says. "I love the speed at which we have to work. I love the unique opportunity to potentially play someone for a very, very long time. I love producing television and it's particularly sentimental for me to be back at HBO."

In contrast to her last long-running engagement, Divorce is much darker in tone. It is pitched as a comedy, but there are wrenching and poignant moments. But it is not, Parker notes, tragic. At least not yet.

"It's an evolution, I think the endeavour toward divorce can be a very long, drawn out experience, and the outcome is yet to be seen," she says.

"The wounds that one inflicts upon another person or are inflicted upon you, those exist, and the children, as collateral damage, their experience in this exists, but one can recover. I don't know yet if it's a tragedy or not."

In the first episode, Frances is trying to make a fresh start with her life having come to terms with the fact her marriage to Robert (Haden-Church) is over. In it, she asks how someone can go from eight years of loving another person to wanting to blow each other's heads off.

In terms of her own experience – she has been married to actor Matthew Broderick since 1997 – Parker says she doesn't understand it.

"But I know it's real for a lot of people," she says. "There are lots of ways to convey that level of resentment and bitterness and anger and frustration and feeling misunderstood or diminished or belittled. On both sides, whatever the partnership is."

One curious aspect of Parker's own fame, or perhaps the cultural resonance of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, is that the 51-year-old actress has found herself fielding questions about the show's wardrobe.

"You'll only see fashion to the degree that she's required to wear clothing," Parker says, wryly. "You won't see fashion because it is not appropriate for her to be someone who has a relationship with fashion beyond her own tastes and what limited choices exist in her closet. I think that's a really big part of our story."

One curious background note on the casting is that Haden Church was offered the part of Robert at Parker's insistence. The pair had done a film together, Smart People, and she says she was a great fan of his as an actor. "I actually loved [his sitcom] Wings, I even loved Ned and Stacey," Parker says.

"I said I know this might be crazy, and only because he hadn't worked in television for so long and it seemed like a choice. I said, I really think my first choice is Thomas Haden Church, and everybody was very excited about that idea but assumed he would simply say no," she says. "I said, well, let's give him the opportunity to say no."

Fortunately he said yes.

"I had a suspicion that if we could talk to him and give him as much material as we had at that point that it might be the very thing that could lure him back because I knew what Robert could be, especially with him playing the role," she says. "I knew from my experience on camera with him many years prior that he was just really special."

To some extent Parker will always be chased by questions about a Sex and the City reunion, particularly in the context of many past hit shows being dusted off for reunions, such as Gilmore Girls, Twin Peaks and Full House.

"I don't think any one of us have ever said no," she says. "We've never been definitive about, it's done and we've closed the book on that time and those experiences. But I really don't know, and I'm not being cagey, it's just we've not ever determined that it's the right time."

One aspect, which was part of the motivation of the reboot of Gilmore Girls, for example, was the idea that such a long and well-established narrative needed a proper conclusion, that somehow the characters need a final chapter to end the story.

"It's funny, I've never thought about it that way," Parker says. "I don't feel like anybody's keeping us from it, I feel like it's [more] figuring out what is the platform, what is the time. I think that we always feel honour bound to those women who gave their time and in many instances their dollars, [so] we feel it better be worth it.

"And for all of us I think to be together again, to shoot on the streets of New York, and have that experience and maybe be finished, as it were, is a very nice idea, but I feel we've been so careful about that heirloom, that we all get to hold and have a piece of that, we want to be thoughtful and very considerate of that choice."

WHAT Divorce

WHEN Showcase, Wednesday, 8.30pm