The irony of the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, which ends its first season Sunday, is that a show initially promoted as having a level of sexual explicitness never before seen on television has turned out to be almost the complete opposite of ratings bait.
The series is almost European in its deliberate pace, insistence on the importance of dialogue, and yes, the amount of nude flesh on display. The prototypical Tell Me You Love Me scene is two people alone in a room, talking quietly (or even harder for some to bear, not talking). There's no music until the closing credits roll. There aren't fights so much as there is emotional violence, and things that don't happen tend to have more import than things that do. Even the sex isn't the sort of rapid-edit, Adrian Lyne-style music video knockoff that Americans are used to seeing onscreen. The lengthiest sex scene so far this season, if not necessarily the most graphic, a "nice to see you again" grappling between exes Jamie (Michelle Borth) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby), conveyed the physical need of both characters, but was so matter-of-fact it ended up about as erotic as those nature films from your 7th grade science class.
The show is structured around 3 couples, all of whom have a relationship with therapist May Foster, played by Jane Alexander (the 68 year-old Alexander had her own sex scene this season, perhaps inspired by her stint in the Clinton administration). The closest thing to an Everyman couple, certainly the pair that seems exactly right as married, is Katie (Ally Walker) and David (Tim DeKay). The couple has stopped having sex, but seem mutually unable to articulate exactly what went wrong, although the accumulated weight of responsibility and family seems as good an explanation as any. In what has been the most startling outburst so far delivered on the show, David used his first visit to May's office to unload at length on how it's impossible to get turned on surrounded by the mundane details of his suburban existence. Katie is incredulous and hurt: "Our entire life. That's what you just trashed," she responds.
For her own part, Katie is obviously uncomfortable dealing with the whole notion of sex as a pleasurable activity in itself, going so far as to recently bring up with David the subject of having another baby, as if by becoming a mom again on the threshold of middle age, she can put off ever having to think about sex again. On the most recent episode, Katie was alarmed to discover that her best friend Rita had decided to divorce. The women had always listened to each other's gripes about husbands and family; now with Rita ditching a husband, making the decisive move that her friend would find unthinkable, Katie seems adrift and hyper.
The other couples are less interesting, if only because the females in them aren't especially likable. Carolyn (Sonya Walger) is an attorney, the sort of driven career woman that doesn't come across well in pop culture. Husband Palek (Adam Scott) is an easygoing builder. The first several episodes of this season chronicled the pair's heavily scheduled sex life as Carolyn set out to get pregnant, something that finally happened only after they had more or less given up on the idea--and after Palek said he really didn't want to have kids anyway. As the last episode ended, Palek, overwhelmed by the baby and a major work setback, suffered a panic attack and later told Carolyn (who had just quit her job) that he needed to leave the marriage. Neither of these people seem well-suited for any relationship, let alone one with each other (I had been blaming Scott for my problems with their storyline, but he's really picked up his performance the last two weeks). But can Palek just walk away from fatherhood with no regrets, the way his own father did?
That leaves Jamie, who has been a lightning rod for critics of the show, in part because Borth's voice takes a lot of getting used to, and in part because as the youngest of the females, Jamie has borne the brunt of the nude scenes. However, I think she's a good deal easier to take now than she was at the start of the season, when she broke things off with Hugo over his refusal to definitively promise he could stay monogamous forever. After Jamie began therapy and confided to May that she herself had never been monogamous, she became more interesting to watch, because she's young enough to show some growth. She went from Hugo right back into a fling with Nick (Ian Somerhalder, who was much cleaner-looking playing a plane crash victim on a tropical island on Lost than he is on this show), but now seems ready to try life alone for a while.
Despite its ratings, which are lower than those for the show that preceded it in HBO's premier Sunday slot, the now-canceled John From Cincinnati, Tell Me You Love Me has been renewed for a second season (it has to be a lot cheaper to produce than David Milch's surfing melodrama was). The final episode is currently running on HBO's on demand channels, and without spoiling anything, I think it was meant to function as a possible series finale, with resolutions of sorts for all the pairings. Things are wrapped up so well that I wonder if the second season might not even have a substantially different cast. Whatever they decide to do, I hope more people check out this unusual and provocative drama. I'll be back next year even if everyone keeps their clothes on.
