By Curt Schleier

CALIFORNICATION is no X-FILE.  Call it the X-Y FILE.  There’s lots of sex. Lots of laughs.  What’s not to like?

Hank Moody (David Duchovny) is a New York-based novelist.  Well, actually, he was a New York-based novelist.  But then he wrote God Hates Us, a book the critics lauded and became a best seller.   Unfortunately, he moved out to Lalaland before it was transformed into a crappy movie (Tom & Katie star in A Crazy Little Thing Called Love).  Then to make matters worse, his long-time girl friend, Karen (Natascha McElhone) broke up with him, taking their daughter, Becca (Madeleine Zima).  And now he has writer’s block.

    What to do?  In CALIFORNICATION (SHOWIME, Mondays at 10:30 p.m.), the answer is simple.  Hank beds every beautiful woman he meets—and there are a lot of them: the wife of the producer who screwed up his book, a young girl he met at a book store, the wife of a motorcycle dude.  Based on a visual inspection, they all have beautiful breasts and are as eager to sleep with Moody as he is to sleep with them.  Throughout the show I kept asking myself why?  Why?
    Why can’t I be like that?  I’m a writer.
    I
    Have
    Writer’s
    Block.
    Ah, what the heck.  CALIFORNICATION shows the potential to become a breakout hit for a cable network desperate to prove “We’re-as-good-and-cool-as-HBO.”  Incongruously, take away the breasts and you have a storyline as old as the Hollywood Hills.  Moody isn’t the first novelist to become disillusioned by his experiences in Los Angeles.  Does the name F. Scott Fitzgerald ring a bell? 
    In fact, this role closely mirrors his role in Jake Kasdan’s THE TV SET (just released on DVD), where he plays a writer frustrated by his dealings with The Network Suits.

    The show is conventional in other ways.  Moody really yearns for a nuclear family.  He really wants to get back with Karen.  And she still likes (loves?) him.  But there are complications.  She’s accepted a proposal from a man she’s been dating.  And then there’s the matter of Hank and the fiancée’s daughter.  (Hey she doesn’t look 16.)

    Conventional or not, CALIFORNICATION isn’t predictable.  It’s funny in an ironic way.  It’s slickly written.  The dialogue is snappy.   “That’s the look that shrivels my testes,” Hank tells Karen.  You’re such a “cliché, Googling yourself,” she says to him.

    Duchovny plays Hank perfectly, with tongue planted firmly in his cheek – and eventually elsewhere, but why get graphic.  How the show plays out may depend upon how Hank’s character develops.  In this first episode he is mostly likable.  But when his agent fixes him up with a blind date, he acts like a Grade A a-hole with her.  It’s possible for a nice guy to be an occasional shit, but this seemed so out of character it was disturbing (to the extent that a TV character can disturb).

    I’m betting it plays out well.  All Moody (and I can’t imagine that name was selected at random) wants is a little peace and redemption.  But as the Rolling Stones song played in the opening sequence makes clear: YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT.