KEY POINTS:
The flipside of being an outrageously successful species is a low boredom threshold and being highly sexed. Think if we were more like, say, those giant sloths, happy just to hang out on branches snoozing and kindly providing a stable environment for the moss and lichens growing in our fur.
You can't imagine sloths would be impressed by members of their species whizzing round mating lots and accumulating pots of money, or far less find them a source of entertainment.
But the human need for titillating drama featuring the fast set is one that never seems to be sated. And, in the US, a place some might call the sorry peak of our civilisation, the stakes are ever higher: not for them the plain Jane soaps named after streets and neighbourhoods, where even serial killers have their cosy side and leave mostly a swag of un-alarming, fake-looking injuries in their wake.
As we have seen lately, American soap-style telly dramas now must come with titles that make them sound like they lead exciting and disreputable double lives as porn films: Californication, Desperate Housewives, Dirty Sexy Money.
Despite the ever racier titles, the action remains much the same, however. Californication started off trying hard to be risque, with that sacrilegious fantasy sequence with a nun, but turned out to be just an old-fashioned love story in the sun-kissed US State of sin. And star David Duchovny is just a tad too sleepy-sounding and, well, sloth-like to maintain much of a sense of scandal.
Dirty Sexy Money is chiefly notable for bringing back the gorgeously wind-swept Big Hair a la the 1980s, courtesy of Donald Sutherland, as the well-blow-dried Darling family patriarch. The question is not just what a class actor is doing in trash like this, but also whether Sutherland is actually in a different show entirely, one that somehow got cut into DSM by mistake. His sad, jilted, intellectual rich man appears to be running his own Shakespearian tragedy in the middle of a glam-trash soap.
The linchpin character, the father-fixated Nick, also seems to have brought his own sideshow, with actor Peter Krause merely continuing his Six Feet Under role as the father-fixated Nate. Perhaps the whole obsession that so many US male fictional characters seem to have with their dads could become a whole genre in its own right.
Meanwhile, around these two the other characters are indulging in soap business as usual, although daughter Karen's job title as professional divorcee and one son's obsession with a trans-sexual adds a certain post-Sex-and-the-City note.
It's mostly the same old stuff on Desperate Housewives, too, despite those constant promos telling us these are ALL NEW episodes of the behind-the-curtains-in-the-desirable-suburban soap.
The latest season should really be given over entirely to Bree and her warped family, the only characters who aren't going round in ever-decreasing circles. Who cares about Susan, Gabrielle and Edie's tedious man-swapping, and wouldn't you just know poor not-so-glamorous Lynette (Felicity Huffman) would be the one to get cancer.
As the show gets ever more camp, bringing in a brace of uppity gay guys to scandalise Wisteria Lane with their stereotype-defying bad taste, you'd think the scriptwriters might do better capitalising on the extraordinary gender-bending skills Huffman displayed in the movie Transamerica.
She could dump the kids and boring hubby and give that breathy, brawny, blonde tranny in DSM a run for her money. Now that might make the couch sloths among us wake up.
