Californicated.
I recently got through the third season of Californication; that's the Showtime series starring David Duchovny as the congenital horn-dog, drunkard and druggie (and occasional published author) Hank Moody. Hank apparently really loves his pubescent daughter, the Wednesday Addams-lite Becca (Madeleine Martin), and her mom, Hank's on-again/off-again main squeeze Karen (Natascha McElhone), but he just can't stop himself from plumbing any and every willing vagina he encounters.
Given the stories of Duchovny's marriage to Téa Leoni flaming out due to his -- wait for it -- sex addiction, I'm forced to conclude that Californication is to David Duchovny what Two and a Half Men was to Charlie Sheen: namely, an opportunity to get handsomely paid for playing a toned-down version of himself in front of two or three cameras. (I doubt if Duchovny is netting a cool two mil an episode the way that Sheen was towards the end of his run, though.)
Honestly, in some respects, Californication is like a cable version of Two and a Half Men: it's gussied up with gratuitous female nudity and frequently funny blue jokes, but shares TaaHM's wildly unrealistic baseline and situations; the problem for me is that the producers of the show also want it to be a touching, rehab-in-the-wings version of Life Goes On, or something: call it Eight Women at Once is Just Showing Off.
The ending of Season Three is the weakest thus far; the whole three-women-on-the-side-at-the-same-time bit that Hank pulled off without any horrible repercussions -- hell, when they find out that he's been three-timing them, they forgive him, and even his putative Beatrice, Karen, forgives him because she was on the other side of the country when he danced the wango-tango with them -- was a bridge too far for me, even by the suspension of disbelief required to follow Californication. I can't believe that this puppy's been renewed for a sixth season. The only way that this series can end that will make any sense is if Hank wakes from a booze-and-drug-induced coma, lying in an alley, soaked in his own bodily fluids, with a kung-fu death-grip on his maimed and bloody johnson, realizing that everything that has gone before was only a dream, an eerily vivid, hallucinatory farrago of sex, auctorial anxieties and domestic drama. Somehow I doubt that I'll be that lucky.
Sure, there have been some real yuk-yuks along the way; Kathleen Turner's guest role in Season Three as the deeply and polyamorously perverse agent Sue Collini has got me champing at the bit to see her in the one-woman play Tallulah, as the "famous for being notorious" actress Tallulah Bankhead. (Man, why hasn't that been filmed?) Pamela Adlon's Marcy Runkle is usually good for a "Did she just say what I think she said?" chuckle, and Evan Handler as Hank's schmendrick agent-cum-best bud Charlie Runkle can be funny and touching, rather as if Charlie Brown grew up to have nearly as many mishaps in his sex life as he did in the more PG-rated parts of his life.
But I'm really questioning if I want to soldier on renting Californication from Netflix. Yes, I'm curious about Rob Lowe's guest role in Season Four (as an actor who wants to play Hank in a movie, no less...), but I don't know if I'm really ready for the continued BS of the family drama that the show periodically tries to turn into. Becca is easily the least believable child character since Little Father Time in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; but unless she turns into a mass murderer-cum-suicide as LFT did, she doesn't even have his minimally redeeming/amusing qualities. (Hell, at this point, I'd settle for her turning into Mandy from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.) Maybe I just need to take a few weeks -- okay, months -- off from it to get the lame-ass denouement of Season Three out of my mind.
(I was amazed at how much my wife enjoyed Californication until the last four or five episodes of Season Three; she also thought that Kathleen Turner was a hoot in it. I suppose I should be thankful that she finds Evan Handler cute: while I resemble neither David Duchovny nor Evan Handler, let's just say that I look like Charlie Runkle a bit more than I do Hank Moody. My wife and I are both puzzled as to why she's willing to excuse Charlie Runkle's bad behavior, but not Hank Moody's: could be that Hank Moody makes Charlie Runkle look almost prim and proper by comparison; could be that Charlie's not the egotistical twat that Hank is, and consequently doesn't go around beating his chest and declaiming how fuckin' fantastic he is like a Gen-X version of Norman Mailer; could be that Charlie is more remorseful and sheepish than Hank ever thought of being; or it could be that the antics and mouth of Charlie's wife Marcy would try the patience of a veritable saint. Whatever; I'm not taking her fondness for Charlie as a sign that she'd forgive me were I to cut up even half as rough as he does. I'm not a complete idiot; I just play one in repertory theatre.)
The second and last disc of Season Three of Californication also contained the first two episodes of the last season of The Tudors, wherein Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a probably-studlier-than-he-was-in-real-life King Henry VIII; curious, I watched the first episode, and was unimpressed. Tamzin Merchant, playing Henry's 15-year-old bride Katherine Howard (although I guess she was supposed to be 17 in this ep), got on my last damn nerve with her incessant, simpering giggles and her developmentally stunted antics.
At least now I know not to bother junking up my Netflix queue with The Tudors. If I start jonesing for a dramatized version of Henry and his court, I'd much rather re-read Margaret George's The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers, or read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
Given the stories of Duchovny's marriage to Téa Leoni flaming out due to his -- wait for it -- sex addiction, I'm forced to conclude that Californication is to David Duchovny what Two and a Half Men was to Charlie Sheen: namely, an opportunity to get handsomely paid for playing a toned-down version of himself in front of two or three cameras. (I doubt if Duchovny is netting a cool two mil an episode the way that Sheen was towards the end of his run, though.)
Honestly, in some respects, Californication is like a cable version of Two and a Half Men: it's gussied up with gratuitous female nudity and frequently funny blue jokes, but shares TaaHM's wildly unrealistic baseline and situations; the problem for me is that the producers of the show also want it to be a touching, rehab-in-the-wings version of Life Goes On, or something: call it Eight Women at Once is Just Showing Off.
The ending of Season Three is the weakest thus far; the whole three-women-on-the-side-at-the-same-time bit that Hank pulled off without any horrible repercussions -- hell, when they find out that he's been three-timing them, they forgive him, and even his putative Beatrice, Karen, forgives him because she was on the other side of the country when he danced the wango-tango with them -- was a bridge too far for me, even by the suspension of disbelief required to follow Californication. I can't believe that this puppy's been renewed for a sixth season. The only way that this series can end that will make any sense is if Hank wakes from a booze-and-drug-induced coma, lying in an alley, soaked in his own bodily fluids, with a kung-fu death-grip on his maimed and bloody johnson, realizing that everything that has gone before was only a dream, an eerily vivid, hallucinatory farrago of sex, auctorial anxieties and domestic drama. Somehow I doubt that I'll be that lucky.
Sure, there have been some real yuk-yuks along the way; Kathleen Turner's guest role in Season Three as the deeply and polyamorously perverse agent Sue Collini has got me champing at the bit to see her in the one-woman play Tallulah, as the "famous for being notorious" actress Tallulah Bankhead. (Man, why hasn't that been filmed?) Pamela Adlon's Marcy Runkle is usually good for a "Did she just say what I think she said?" chuckle, and Evan Handler as Hank's schmendrick agent-cum-best bud Charlie Runkle can be funny and touching, rather as if Charlie Brown grew up to have nearly as many mishaps in his sex life as he did in the more PG-rated parts of his life.
But I'm really questioning if I want to soldier on renting Californication from Netflix. Yes, I'm curious about Rob Lowe's guest role in Season Four (as an actor who wants to play Hank in a movie, no less...), but I don't know if I'm really ready for the continued BS of the family drama that the show periodically tries to turn into. Becca is easily the least believable child character since Little Father Time in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; but unless she turns into a mass murderer-cum-suicide as LFT did, she doesn't even have his minimally redeeming/amusing qualities. (Hell, at this point, I'd settle for her turning into Mandy from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.) Maybe I just need to take a few weeks -- okay, months -- off from it to get the lame-ass denouement of Season Three out of my mind.
(I was amazed at how much my wife enjoyed Californication until the last four or five episodes of Season Three; she also thought that Kathleen Turner was a hoot in it. I suppose I should be thankful that she finds Evan Handler cute: while I resemble neither David Duchovny nor Evan Handler, let's just say that I look like Charlie Runkle a bit more than I do Hank Moody. My wife and I are both puzzled as to why she's willing to excuse Charlie Runkle's bad behavior, but not Hank Moody's: could be that Hank Moody makes Charlie Runkle look almost prim and proper by comparison; could be that Charlie's not the egotistical twat that Hank is, and consequently doesn't go around beating his chest and declaiming how fuckin' fantastic he is like a Gen-X version of Norman Mailer; could be that Charlie is more remorseful and sheepish than Hank ever thought of being; or it could be that the antics and mouth of Charlie's wife Marcy would try the patience of a veritable saint. Whatever; I'm not taking her fondness for Charlie as a sign that she'd forgive me were I to cut up even half as rough as he does. I'm not a complete idiot; I just play one in repertory theatre.)
The second and last disc of Season Three of Californication also contained the first two episodes of the last season of The Tudors, wherein Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a probably-studlier-than-he-was-in-real-life King Henry VIII; curious, I watched the first episode, and was unimpressed. Tamzin Merchant, playing Henry's 15-year-old bride Katherine Howard (although I guess she was supposed to be 17 in this ep), got on my last damn nerve with her incessant, simpering giggles and her developmentally stunted antics.
At least now I know not to bother junking up my Netflix queue with The Tudors. If I start jonesing for a dramatized version of Henry and his court, I'd much rather re-read Margaret George's The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers, or read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.