By Curt Schleier
California’s a big state where it’s easy to lose your mojo. But there are plenty of ways to fill that void – and CALIFORNICATION offers several, two naked breasts at a time
Hank Moody (David Duchovny) is a decent guy in wolf’s clothing. And that’s part of his charm. He has it both ways. Women find him irresistible. But because of an almost childlike innocence about him, you want to forgive his bad-boy behavior.
Moody is a New York writer transplanted to Los Angeles; in the process of moving he lost his long-time girlfriend, their daughter and his will to write. Moody can’t find his creative mojo in Lalaland; in its place he substitutes CALIFORNICATION (Showtime, Mondays, 10:30 p.m.).
Let us first consider his innocence. Women sense it and come to him for advice. For example, he’s sitting at a traffic light in his beat up Porsche when a beautiful woman stops next to him. They engage in a brief conversation after which she shoots him a paper airplane with her phone number on it.
Turns out she’s a porn star who needs his advice. She wants to know how her breasts shape up, and after Moody compliments them, she asks him to check out her vagina. She’s concerned she has sloppy vaginal lips. Does she need a vaginal rejuvenation? Reassured, they come together only to be interrupted by the porn star’s baby daughter crying in the next room. Most guys would become deaf. What kid? Not Moody who tells the porn star: “Go, be with your daughter.”
It’s not like he has to wait long for his next encounter. He’s at his former girlfriend’s house for a dinner party where he’s paired up with a woman whose husband just left her – for his assistant Ted. Later, when they’re alone, she strips and asks Hank to assess her 40ish body. Report card in hand (she got all “A”s), she begs him to do the nasty with her.
Like Moody, CALIFORNICATIOIN is more than meets the eye. On the one hand, it is a very funny satire about a society’s preoccupation with youthful looks – down to vaginal lips – and sex. Sitting at the dinner party, women on either side of him play with Moody’s dingaling under the table cloth. And saying women is an overstatement; one of them is a 16-year-old girl.
It would be easy to dismiss CALIFORNIATION as series creator Tom Kapinos’ wet dream come to life. There is substance beneath the breast count -- and a surprising mid-20th Century conventionality. Moody wants Karen (Natascha McElhone) back. Their daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin) not only wants them to get back together, but wants them back together in New York.
In this episode we not only discover how Karen and Hank met, but that they met cute, in a kind of movie-they-should-be-together-forever style. And that’s really what’s at the center of CALIFORNICATION. After all the laughs and after all the titties, it’s an old fashioned love story.