The sex gets in the way of HBO series
In spite of itself, the drama Tell Me You Love Me falls into the same trap its characters face.
By Eric Deggans, Times TV/media critic
Published September 7, 2007
Review
Tell Me You Love Me
Airs at 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO. Rating: TV-MA (Mature Audiences). Grade: B
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This is the headline HBO wants you to read: Shocking new adult series with sex scenes so explicit, critics wonder if the actors were acting at all!
Indeed, HBO's Tell Me You Love Me seems genetically engineered to produce salacious controversy. Focused on the fumblings of three couples struggling to connect emotionally, it's a meandering relationship drama packed with graphic, surprisingly unerotic coupling focused on a single thesis:
Too often, sex masks the bigger problems in a relationship.
"Sex is a great thing to hide behind," says former ER star Sherry Stringfield, playing the best friend of a long-married woman who hasn't had sex in more than a year. "For a lot of people, it's easier to have sex than talk."
And after viewing all 10 episodes in this ambitious drama's first season, it hit me: HBO built a series with the very same issues. The graphic sex shown here mostly masks Tell Me You Love Me's biggest problem: The sex gets in the way of some really compelling stories.
Of course, the stars of the show don't see it that way.
"These scripts, they really explore something that's in between people . . . the intimacy in between people, and sex does happen to be a part of that," said Ally Walker, best known as the star of NBC's crime drama Profiler. "It's not gratuitous and it's not phony and it's kind of, you know, staged accordingly. So it has a very real feeling, which I think does kind of upset some people."
I wonder if the controversy over the show springs from a simpler source. Besides being shot in a manner so realistic you can't help feeling like you're peeping into someone's actual bedroom, there are at least three scenes where male actors are fully, frontally nude, and viewers can see what appears to be their, um, equipment.
The shocking thing is that, for some people, this may be the most shocking part of the show.
"In general, I think there's a stronger reaction to male nudity than female nudity," said Elana Levine, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. "Women's bodies often stand in for sex in films. . . . If they want something to seem sexy or communicate something about sexual attraction, women's bodies are used, not men's."
Odd as it seems, male appendages are often the culture's line between mainstream entertainment and pornography. And Tell Me pushes that line in its very first episode, showing two graphic sex scenes - including one featuring four-time Oscar nominee Jane Alexander - in which it seems much of the action is visible and real.
"This may be the last frontier, in terms of (what's shown) to get audiences to watch," said David Natharius, a professor emeritus of human communication and humanities at California State University in Fresno. "Our culture doesn't particularly care for frontal nudity in males, but when it happens, people sure want to see it."
The sex in Tell Me is also controversial for what it usually isn't: sexy or titillating.
Unlike conventional entertainment fare, which often deploys nudity and sex to excite viewers, there is no attempt made to make these liaisons attractive for the audience. Instead, producers have leaned in the opposite direction, presenting the couplings in Tell Me as needy, distracting, obligatory, compulsive or desperate - anything but sexy, and rarely enjoyable for more than a moment or two.
"The decision we made . . . wasn't to push the envelope, but to be honest about the language of intimacy," said HBO Entertainment president Carolyn Strauss, an executive credited with helping develop hits such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under in two decades at the premium cable channel.
"That, I think, is a very different choice than, say, let's be Puritan," Strauss added, pulling a hole card HBO often plays when criticized: Naysayers just don't get it. "I know that the sex is getting enormous amounts of attention, but you really cannot tell the story of intimacy without using sex honestly as part of your tool kit."
Leaving aside the laughable notion that anyone connected to Tell Me is surprised that the explicit sex scenes are drawing journalists' attention, this project does offer a unique perspective that may be lost in all the sex talk.
Centered on three couples from three different generations seeing the same therapist, the program examines the specifics of each relationship's dysfunction in often excruciating detail.
Walker and Carnivale alum Tim DeKay are Katie and David, the story's oldest couple, 40-somethings with two young children who haven't had sex in more than 12 months. Sonya Walger (Desmond's lost love on Lost) and Adam Scott are 30-something Carolyn and Palek, a driven yuppie couple whose yearlong quest to get pregnant has turned sex into a maddening obligation.
Jamie (Michelle Borth) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby) are engaged 20-somethings using sex to avoid the fact that Jamie doesn't trust Hugo to be faithful, and he can't tolerate that. And Alexander is therapist May Foster, trying to help them all while dealing with her own relationship issues.
TV buffs will note the cast's best-known names aren't even in starring roles.
Stringfield is Katie's best friend, while Falcon Crest's David Selby plays Foster's trusting mate, and another Lost veteran, Ian Somerhalder, hooks up with Jamie when her engagement to Hugo crumbles.
(A crucial cameo even exposes the show's striking lack of diversity, when former Blade star Kirk "Sticky Fingaz" Jones, who is black, pops up as a weed-smoking boyfriend to Carolyn's sister).
Creator-executive producer Cynthia Mort is an expert at capturing the ragged edges of relationships in crisis: the arguments that seem to be about one thing, but are really about another; the lies told to save a partner's feelings that eventually fall away; the way in which couples express their love for each other, and how little that can matter when serious problems are at hand.
When Tell Me shines, it flips assumptions. David resists therapy until he becomes the one who provides the most breakthroughs, Jamie fears infidelity because she is the person most likely to commit it, and Palek's selfishness in finally deciding he doesn't want children is matched only by Carolyn's selfishness once she decides she does.
The show's title comes from a demand Somerhalder's character makes of Jamie, painfully aware that her inability to fulfill that request is the root of their problems.
But the series chews over these issues so slowly that viewers will spend weeks wallowing in these couples' misery before deeper meanings emerge in the final episodes. Watching these six people fail to connect again and again I kept wondering: Wasn't there ever anything positive about their lives together?
And, more importantly, can a Sopranos-less HBO rebuild its influence on the back of this slow-moving, sex-filled relationship drama?
Because the answer to that question may be the only headline that really matters.
Eric Deggans can be reached at (727) 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com. See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.