A writer tries to juggle his career, his relationship with his daughter and his ex-girlfriend, as well as his appetite for beautiful women. Read more
| Starring | David Duchovny, Natascha McElhone, Madeleine Martin, Madeline Zima |
|---|---|
| Director | Stephen Hopkins, Scott Winant, Michael Lembeck |
| Genres | Television |
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A writer tries to juggle his career, his relationship with his daughter and his ex-girlfriend, as well as his appetite for beautiful women.
| Starring | David Duchovny, Natascha McElhone, Madeleine Martin, Madeline Zima, Evan Handler |
|---|---|
| Director | Stephen Hopkins, Scott Winant, Michael Lembeck |
| Studio | Paramount |
| Run time | DVD: 5 hrs 27 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Television |
| Language | English |
| Released | DVD: 16 Jun 2008 Production year: 2007 |
| Format | DVD |
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No doubt the ‘minds’ behind this series wanted to ‘push the envelope’ and be the first to go beyond innuendo and non-nude material to which adult programmes such as Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives were restricted; before Californication, if a person wanted pornography, they had to look elsewhere. No doubt the justification for this ‘breakthrough’ was that a ban on sexual nudity on television is no longer appropriate in today’s climate. That today’s climate is what it is because things like this have driven standards of morality down either hasn’t occurred to them or is something about which they don’t care. Thus we now have a syndicated pornographic television series added to the mountains of hardcore pornography that was already available for those who want/need it. For be in no doubt, pornography - material designed to stimulate sexual excitement - is all Californication can be described as. Producers want profit and they know sex sells; this is merely the logical extension of the current levels of sexual content along the thinking that the greater the level of sex, the greater the profits will be.
Stereotypical model-type women, exactly what feminists have been begging women to reject if they’re ever to put an end to sexual exploitation and objectification, desperately trying to get themselves taken seriously as actresses while casually delivering dialogue with their breasts out, is laughable. No one in front of the camera can conceal their discomfort at the brazenness of it all. One can read in their faces their shame at the level to which they’ve stooped to get work. David Duchovny looks like he’s suffering several levels of unease from not wanting viewers to think he’s just an old pervert only involved to ogle naked women almost young enough to be his daughters to allowing talentless bimbos to gain professional kudos from ‘working’ alongside someone of his credentials (which, incidentally, were achieved without taking his clothes off). In their turn, the women all look as if they’re desperately hoping their parents, grandparents, brothers (and their male friends) don’t ever take an interest in how their ‘acting’ career is progressing, while simultaneously trying to ignore the intense scrutiny of the very real and present male crew she’s putting on a free, full frontal, sex show for.
The dialogue, far from being clever and witty, reeks of the same televisual experiment in pushing the bounds of decency, seeming to take deliberate pains to describe the gamut of sexual practices and doing so in the most artificially flippant manner possible. Literature students casually ask to be ‘serviced’ and hitch up their shirts and bend over to be taken from behind by the teacher before skipping off to their next class, Natascha McElhone berates Duchovny for “stinking of [insert expletive for vagina]”, men chat on the phone to their mates while being felated under the desk…you get the idea. This is the necessary masquerade of drama for the producers to point to in their defense against the conservative backlash they know they’ll receive. Yet the sexual content is too strong and too frequent to lend any credibility to a claim that Californication is anything other than what its very name clearly states.
Avoid like the proverbial plague; this isn’t big, it isn’t clever, and it isn’t *required* - there’s enough masturbatory material around as it is.
It's not often I laugh out loud when watching TV but this tickled me. It's a great series and well worth a watch!!
The Best Of Sheridan Smith (15)
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