KEY POINTS:
If nothing else, Californication (last night, TV3) provided a headline for a Sunday paper: Churches Blast TV Nun's Sex Romp.
I blasted it too, although rather more mildly, from the couch. I do hate a dream sequence to be so obviously a dream sequence. Actually, what I really
hate is a dream sequence that is such a cliche.
David Duchovny's the lead - and an executive producer - of this new series with the tacky name, so I suppose we can be glad his character, Hank, doesn't dream of aliens.
As anyone could work out from the title, there is going to be a lot of bonking.
Bonking is almost always tedious on the telly, featuring as it does sheets pulled up over the bloke's bits while the lady's top bits go jiggle jiggle. They don't jiggle jiggle too much in Californication because this is California at its tackiest: the bits are not supposed to look real and the sex is not supposed to look sexy. It's supposed to look tired and silly and tacky because Hank's life is all of the above.
Duchovny is very good here at being tired, silly, tacky and world-weary.
He's a writer who can't write - another cliche beloved of Hollywood. He wrote a seriously good book, called God Hates Us All, which was taken so seriously it was made into a film called A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, starring Tom and Katie. This would make any writer with pretensions towards being taken seriously wonder whether he had tempted fate with his title.
God (and now the church in what could be a beat-up follows art storyline) hates Hank and Hank hates his life. In a cynical sort of way: "I'm disgusted with myself and my life, but I'm not unhappy about that."
Hank has only started seeing just how far he can go, making himself disgusted with himself, although he's already gone fairly far. He's vile to everyone, particularly women, who are included in the plot so that he can either be rude to them or have sex with them.
The exception is Karen (Natascha McElhone) his former partner, the mother of his daughter and the woman he forgot to marry.
Karen is now with a rich, boring bloke who can offer her stability and marriage.
Hank, belatedly, asks her to marry him which only makes her despise him more.
She said: "You didn't want to join the herd, that's what I dug about you. Imagine my disgust when you turned out to be the biggest cliche of all, sitting there and googling yourself."
Actually, he had further to go.
He's offered a regular gig, a blog. This will involve writing about all those things that annoy him and which is the modern definition of a complete loser.
You can't create a character who is a total pig if you are going to make a series about his life (unless you are Larry David), so we have to see that Hank is a devoted father to his 12-year-old daughter. It is the devoted father bit that might be the one cliche too far.
