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CALIFORNICATION REVIEW

Californication Review
by Annie Berke

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An exercise in bad taste, Showtime’s new series is all boob and no bite.

First Debra Messing (alias: Grace Adler) disappoints me in “The Starter Wife,” and now this?! I am an X-Files super-fan, having watched the show seasons after it stopped making sense and long after the sexual tension between the leads became a parody of itself. The character of Mulder, with his dry wit and obsession with finding the Truth, remained a huge selling point for the show, and we all know “The X-Files” wasn’t the same once David Duchovny was replaced by that guy from the Terminator movies. And, in the interest of absolutely full disclosure, I even own the romantic comedy, Return to Me, which stars Duchovny, a movie very sweet but one only watched—and certainly only owned—by the most die-hard of Duchovny fans.

Obviously, I have been looking forward to Duchovny’s new gig, the Showtime series “Californication,” all summer, in spite of its trite, sensationalized title, but “Californication” is a vapid, uninteresting vehicle, a show that attempts to entertain purely through shock value. The premise is this: Hank Moody (Duchovny) is a “one-hit wonder” living in Hollywood whose literary masterpiece, God Hates Us All, has just been adapted to the

blockbuster smash, A Crazy Little Thing Called Love. (We are meant to believe that a book called God Hates Us All is genius, and Moody is a tormented genius.) Moody, the ultimate self-destructive personality, is hapless in parenting his precocious twelve-year-old daughter or winning back his effortlessly beautiful ex-wife; to distract from his writers’ block, he sleeps with numerous California beach bunnies, some of whom are married, and none of whom have feelings we are meant to care about. Moody is our concern, our boy, the team we are rooting for. As a California valley girl might put it: As if! The character is not nearly witty or intriguing enough to override his insensitivity and self-absorption. Period.

Writing this review has put my hypothetical future friendship with Duchovny in jeopardy, but I must press on: I cannot imagine anyone could enjoy this show, except for thirteen-year-old boys who have never seen a topless woman before. This plot is little more than a justification for what is otherwise soft-core porn: TV Guide noted that in the first episode of “Californication,” we see 9 breasts, four sex acts, and one shot of Duchovny’s butt. The gratuitous sexuality is tedious, not titillating, and some moments—a grown-up child star from “The Nanny” punches Hank in the face while they have sex—are plain uncomfortable. Hank Moody may not have taken a shower in some time, but you’ll want to take one after one interminable half-hour of “Californication.”

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