Californication

[katranna]

So I've been catching up on Californication and it's... interesting. I really enjoyed the 1st season. It was raunchy and gritty and yes, very male-fantasy-focused, but in a way that I consider good fun sometimes. I read reviews complaining about it being misogynistic, but I didn't consider it particularly so. It was obviously written by men and

Comments

[paulhope]

I feel like a lot of media today is about pushing the envelope, so of regardless of what part of the envelope or which envelope. There's clearly a market for something that indulges these kinds of fantasies, so if Californication didn't do it, wouldn't somebody else?

I suppose the same goes for criticism of extremist media. Like, somebody's got to call out the show on being indulgent and misogynist.

But the outraged feminist blogosphere isn't the target audience that is pulling it through to a fourth season. That resistance has got to be a calculated risk on the part of the producers. Or, it's factored in because all the outraged viewers are still buying DVD's and getting into it or spreading the word about it.

I don't know what I'm ranting about, except I guess the futility of media outrage that is simultaneously feeding media consumption.

So what I don't understand, I guess, is how this

[katranna]

You didn't finish.

All I'm saying is, I expect more sophisticated male ego fantasy from Showtime. Or grownups in general. Even the cheesy porn nowadays knows it is being cheesy and sends itself up. Californication takes its ridiculous "plot" contrivances seriously.

It can have all the sex and the misogyny it wants, but I expect more than "all the girls just cannot resist Hank's dick and will crawl to the ends of the earth to get themselves some, even the unavailable ones!"