Screwed Up.(Californication, Tell Me You Love Me)(Television program review)

The portmanteau title of the new Showtime series "Californication," in case you hadn't noticed, contains a reference to a certain act, an act that is performed by two parties, but the act that the show itself calls to mind is the solitary and less fruitful act of autoerotic asphyxiation: this is a show that loves itself to death. Created by Tom Kapinos, who was a writer and a producer on "Dawson's Creek" for a number of years, "Californication" follows the travails of a New York novelist turned Hollywood writer--Hello? You there? I thought I saw you nod off when I said "travails of a New York novelist turned Hollywood writer"--named Hank Moody. The problem is that Hank (David Duchovny) hasn't written anything since he moved to Los Angeles, because he feels sick to the bottom of his soul. I believe this sickness has something to do with that city's practice of using people until they're all used up and then spitting them out, not to mention its low standards and its black heart. Hank's novel "God Hates Us All," a sturm-und-dranger, has been turned into a romantic comedy called "A Crazy Little Thing Called Love"; ads and posters featuring its stars, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, seem to mock Hank as he moves through his days, unshaved and unemployed, except for his couplings with pretty much any woman he comes into contact with. Hank is in pain--he's separated from his longtime partner, Karen (Natascha McElhone), and doesn't get to see their twelve-year-old daughter, Becca (Madeleine Martin), as much as he'd like. Karen finally ran out of patience with his balkiness about marriage, left him, and is now engaged to a stiff named Bill (Damian Young, who was just as wooden as Lisa Kudrow's husband in "The Comeback").

"Californication" wants to have it all. It wants to be a comedy; a fist shaking at the depredations of the Hollywood machine (Kapinos has said that between "Dawson's Creek" and "Californication" he wrote a handful of pilots that ended up going nowhere); a satire of same; and a heartstring-tugging family drama. The last would require us to care terribly whether Hank and Karen end up back together, with the family intact once again. The strange thing is that the family already seems intact: Karen is clearly still in love with Hank--either that or she has had her face surgically altered into a permasmile. Whenever he shows up, and despite the fact that he says rude things to her fiance, Karen gives him adoring looks and laughs at his jokes (which are funny), as if he and she were still courting. But what's most puzzling about "Californication" is that much of the time it resembles a soft-porn film, in the sense that there isn't just nudity and sex but a particular kind of nudity and sex, shot in a particular way, aimed at a particular audience: girl invariably on top, man below keeping hands more or less to himself, in order to give the ta-ta cam maximum access. This kind of cheesiness is all about what the camera sees, rather than about the story and what the characters are feeling. (You can't help remembering that Duchovny's first TV series was the whisper-soft-porn show "Red Shoe Diaries.") Twice in the first two episodes, women, for no reason, disrobe and ask Hank to evaluate their bodies.

It's true that Hank is supposed to be cheesy; not using his "incredible talent," as Karen calls it, has made him sloppy and stupid. But at the ...