By Curt Schleier

The folks at HBO expected TELL ME YOU LOVE ME to become a water cooler show.  By that I mean a show everyone talks about the next morning around the water cooler.  And who can blame them? The show has attractive actors displaying parts of their bodies that are usually reserved for NC-17 movies – and yes I’m talking penis here.  Who wouldn’t expect people to be talking?

Well either I’ve been hanging around the wrong water cooler, the people who watch the show are drinking bottled water or they’re just not thirsty.   And episode three is as good an example of why as any.  There’s very little movement.  And what there is seems to be backwards.

Consider couple number one.  Jamie (Michelle Borth), a chef, has broken her engagement to Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby).  After she heard him say – at her engagement party, no less – that he doubted he could remain faithful, she broke up with him.  Jamie is in her 20s and is a 21st Century woman.  Right?

Not so fast Neanderthals.  Almost immediately she starts to miss him.  Miss doesn’t begin to describe the situation.  She calls him and leaves messages.  At one point a friend asks: “Where is your pride?” 

Earlier the friend advised her: “You need to have sex with someone else right now.”


Can you imagine if a guy had recommended that?  He would have been stoned.  But it was a girl friend who suggested it, so she calls an old boy friend and tries to do the nasty.  But her heart isn’t in it and so they never get to finish.  So she goes back to pestering her boyfriend.  He friend gets her a lap dance (from a female) and Jamie sits there.  “You’re like a human valium,” the friend says.  Boy do I know what she means.

Then there’s Carolyn (Sonya Walger) and Palek (Adam Scott) who can’t get pregnant and seem to feel that a therapist is the answer.  Or was the answer.  Without telling Palek, Carolyn goes to her obstetrician and finds out that her plumbing apparently isn’t the problem.  So at the start of this episode Palek is at a clinic attempting to make a deposit.  To help him, Carolyn is on the phone from her car offering phone sex so antiseptic it made me shrivel as though I’d just come out of a cold swimming pool. (And you SEINFELD fans know what I mean.) 

And, guess what?  His little fishes have “beautiful motility” so he’s not the problem.  So now that he knows he’s not to blame, he tells friends that they are officially trying.  She tells them they’ve been trying for a year, but their lack of success is not Palek’s fault because “his sperm is really really good.”  They fight.  They have good make-up sex.  And we have to wait and see.

Katie and Dave are still not having sex, even though it’s their anniversary.  She hints and hints but he doesn’t get it.  And I’m sick and tired of it.  If she wants sex so badly, be aggressive, take his dick and put it in her mouth.  And if that doesn’t work, get angry.  Get him to talk about it.  Maybe he’s having a physical problem.  But do something for goodness sakes.  What Katie needs is to have sex with someone else.  Anyone else.  A good screwing will make her feel better.  I’m sorry; I’m not allowed to say that.  Maybe she should go out and have drinks with Jamie’s friend.

And then there’s the elderly therapist, May Foster (JANE ALEXANDER).  There’s something in her past involving a guy John.  Her husband Arthur (David Selby) calls him, and tells her “I want you to see him.  And then come home to me.”  It sounds like dialogue from one of those romance novels.

What ever.  It works.  They start to have sex again.   And I had to turn my head.