“It doesn't exactly take Freud to figure it out.”
(Californication)
 
Turns out that this above line from last night's premiere of Californication is the understatement of the century - but, admittedly, it was always going to be. For all the elements in this ridiculous new show (in total, there's probably about three), surprise was not one of them. And sure, I approached Californication quite biased. There I sat, at 9.30pm, sitting patiently through the end of SVU, ready for the latest Next Big Thing™ of Ten’s, and I already hated it. But that’s fair enough – I’m not invalidating what I’m about to say from any confession of impartiality. Advertising and publicity is fair game, and, in 2007, is all part of the show. Ten, with their exceptionally talented hype-advertising team, have become increasingly defined by their ability to create sensationalist pre-show marketing, which the actual product can’t possibily live up to; and in true form, they’ve pumped the living daylights out of this one. The network needs the breakthrough, so badly, they think they can simply tell an audience they love the show, and, having not seen any of it, they will comply. No matter what we eventually witness, we are supposed to love whatever unfolds, because the matter is well and truly decided, and the perception installed by the hype over-rides our objectivity. That’s advertising, in so many ways – it’s certainly where it’s been heading for the past few years, and will continue to -  and, tragically, it works for many of the blissfully susceptible mainstream. So, fair enough if it doesn’t work with me. And it didn’t. Californication was the show everyone turned up to love; but I turned up to hate the fucker. And I’m rather proud of that.

If I had to watch that trite, little angsty-slash-quirky-slash-confused teenage daughter, one more time, as she asked her brooding-slash-bohemian-slash-sexy father why the woman had no hair on her vagina, I was potentially going to end up thowing my GPS Nokia through my LG widescreen plasma. You know what I’m saying? I mean, really; we get it, okay? The Sex & The City phenomenon is to be replaced by an awful funkification of the male slut who, thanks to millions of people who secretly fantasise about unrealisatic – seemingly inappopriate - sex lives, rather enjoy the pretentious paper-thin premise as a reason to basically watch sexy people fuck. End of story.

And that’s exactly what we got. Oh, what a Bad Boy™ is David Duchovny’s character (whose name, I’m glad to say, my brain didn’t find relevant enough to store). The ads promised us that the first scene would… ahem… “blow us away”; and yes, he got his blowjob… from a nun… in a church. But it’s okay – don’t worry – it was just a dream! Oh, good. That must have excused milions of hard-ons, all over the country.

But what I particularly loved about Californication is that the ultimate excuse - the excuse de resistance, if you please – was that, in the end, Hank (oh, bugger, I do remember it) was not to blame for being such a Bad Boy™. But, of course! It must have been the woman’s fault!

Hank, you see, is recently a divorcee. By force. He’s actually a loving, wonderful man - men would be, after all - if it were not for having his heart broken by his cold-hearted bitch of a wife who cheated on this loving father of an angsty-slash-quirky-slash-confused teenage daughter. This is why he is forced - forced, I tell you – to go out and, as his cold-hearted bitch of a wife puts it, “fuck everything that moves” – particularly, it would seem, if that object is also married. In fact, the show begins with Duchovny in bed with another man’s wife (she’s the nun in the dream), and, quite literally, goes from her bed to the next - where the last married woman he's been screwing waits for him. Later, Hank’s horrible friend analyses him to a tea; “You seem to have a thing for unavailable women” (hence, the nun in the dream, who is “married” to the biggest dude of them all). Spoonfeed it to the mainstream, won't you, Californication? Make sure they get the trite faux-profound of it all.
 
And so, Hank is a - here's a big word for you - Contradiction™. Yes, he's an asshole who sleeps with other men's wives; but it’s all a Complex™ reaction – a kind of inversion of power – that is as a result of being cheated on. So, you know - it’s still the woman’s fault. We glimpse (for the sake of our conscience) his Soft™ reality for no more than a total of two minutes of the entire show; first introducing this facet in a scene where he breaks down for his ex-wife and confesses, “I’m fucked up. I need help. I need… you.” He literally crumbles on her, throwing his arms around the woman he loved. Naturally, she removes them, rejects him, and informs him that she is marrying the man she cheated on him with. Later, he shows us a brief glimmer, again, and asks her to marry him, instead of the asshole lawyer she ran off with. She won’t. What a bitch!
 
For the remaining 58 minutes, he’s just a dull moron who, quite tiresomely, spends the entire show sleeping with various women he shouldn’t be, and avoiding any semblance of a narrative or depth. He fucks the wife of the “asshole” who turned his one glorious book into a shitty film; he even fucks his daughters’ babysitter (she’s 16 – but it’s okay… he didn’t know she was 16). Oh, and he says “fuck” many, many, many times. So does his wife. But she’s a foul-mouthed cheating whore, so, you know, she would.

Basically, it’s soft-porn for bored under-sexed suburban couples who connect, ever so tellingly, to the plastic nihilism of it all.  And it’s all okay. At every step of the way, the fact that they’re watching deliberately tasteless soft-porn is excused for them; which, thankfully, allows them to feel no guilt and to (this is the bit I love) watch it on the lounge next to their distant spouse, and not feel self-conscious or… what’s the term… caught out, in any way.

And it all ends with poor Hank, retiring from his sexscapade, drifting into muted, tackily softened flashback montages of his days as a loving husband to his wife and child, as… wait for it… Elton John’s “Rocket Man” plays in the background. “I miss my wife… I miss my child.” Aaaawwww. Poor little heart-broken man. He wants to fuck nuns, and he actually does fuck sixteen year olds (accidentally, and all); but he misses domesticity. The irony, you see – it’s all about the irony. In the end, as the distant spouses sit there watching Hank, wishing they were character’s in Hank’s world of Californication, fucking like moral-free rabbits in deliberately immoral contexts, the irony is that Hank just wants to be them. Do you get it? Do you? Huh? Oh, it’s so very deep.

Californication continues, next week, when, from what we can safely gather from the promo, we get another hour of exactly the same rubbish. Maybe I’m too savvy to self-destructive tendencies to romanticise them as the fantasy of my unhappiness – heck, maybe I’m too gay – but I don’t think I ever need to slip between poor old Hank’s sheets, ever again.