TV Review: Satisfaction

Australian-made Satisfaction fails to deliver so far.

As if Californication wasn't doing a good enough job turning telly-of-the-night into a red light district, now the Aussies are getting in on the act with Melbournifornication - oh okay, it's actually called Satisfaction, a drama about sex workers (TV2, Monday, 10pm).

And in our transtasman cousins' usual frank and no-frills way, the show got straight down to business in last night's first episode with the memorable opening exchange between old pro and client: "Do you want me in my undies or not?" "Not."

Warning: this show is far more explicit than its American counterparts, and, as one critic put it, "delivers full-frontal nudity and sex before you've had a chance to settle into your lounge chair". There are no coy camera angles or strategically placed bits of set, nor any sign of that strange American habit, so beloved by the inhabitants of Sex and the City, of having sex in unruffled underwear.

But the question is whether there is anything else to save this from being a bit of barely dressed up late evening porn?

Judging by last night's pilot, it's trying to fill in the gaps with real, involving drama but is so busy striving for "authenticity" in all those sex scenes, that it is not making much of a job of it so far.

Satisfaction ostensibly follows the lives of a group of high-class hookers, happy and unhappy, in a telegenic establishment far away from the usual perceptions of squalid, drug-addicted prostitution on the streets. But although the girls are uniformly good-looking and their slinky outfits shimmering, the dialogue is less than coruscating: "I don't have any knickers," bewails Chloe, getting changed in the car on her way to another job. "They won't stay on long anyway," says the
driver.

Not much money has been spent on the plot, either. Last night's episode focused on Chloe's story, which, we learned in golden-hued flashbacks, began with her running away from her outback home at some tender age and turning the truckie who gave her a lift into her first client.

Yes, the cliches ran on longer than the Stuart Highway: In a piece of age-old hypocrisy, Chloe won't let her teenage daughter wear slutty clothes. Her real boyfriend is a hot muso who pops round to do it with her, oh no, not on the granite-top kitchen bench guys, please.

Meanwhile, back at the workplace we meet a completely expected array of clients: losers, kinky losers, bastards, kinky bastards. The show, however, is into a third series, has won best drama nominations and a best actress award on its home turf so things must improve down the line. Perhaps it really does turn into a meaningful exploration of whether being a sex worker is a soul-destroying degradation or a rather fun job with perks.

But so far, it's pretty hard to swallow the glam hookers, bad lines and stinkers.