Decidedly adult, 'Californication' is sexy, funny, original -- and the best new show on TV in way too long

August 10, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic

I'm going to spoil just one of the many great bits of dialogue in Showtime's "Californication" -- the best new TV show in a year. The main character, Hank, argues with a naked lover. She insults his writing, so he cuts her down like the great author he is.

"Not only are you a cadaverous lay, you have [crappy] taste in movies," Hank says.

Have you ever heard someone refer to a lover as a "cadaverous lay"? I doubt it. That's a mark of clever, original writing.

There are also three excellent vagina jokes. Now, I'm sure you hear vagina jokes all the time, but how many of them stick to your ribs?

There's more sexiness. Hank (David Duchovny) pleasures three naked women. Since you haven't seen the show (a drama played as comedy), these twists could sound like cheap laughs. They're not. They are integral to the storytelling and the fascinating, adult characters.

The excellent Duchovny plays Hank as a sharp, confident novelist whose longtime love (the mother of his daughter) has left him. He's in the drunk dumps. But unlike other TV characters, Hank doesn't let others define him. He continues to grasp what he desires and to gasp a full breadth of living in the moment.

Can Hank really be the most self-aware and assured male on TV since "Moonlighting's" David Addison? Maybe. We'll see how the series progresses. (Duchovny also made Agent Fox Mulder a real and good man in "The X-Files," though Mulder was a romantic flop.)

At any rate, thank God that Duchovny is back on TV. He's one of the great comedy actors alive. You know what I mean if you've watched the funnier episodes of "The X-Files," his stints on "The Larry Sanders Show" and now this.

Women don't suffer to make Hank look good. Though one passerby is a straw woman for him to set up and knock down, his ex (Natascha McElhone), plus a peculiar fan (Madeline Zima) and others give as good as they get.

The directing and writing are pitch-perfect. Creator Tom Kapinos fashioned Hank on antiheroes of 1970s films like "Shampoo" and "Blume in Love."

"His only problem is he's committed to telling the truth at all costs," Kapinos says. "It's a very noble thing, but I think it gets exhausting for the people around him."

Kapinos wrote for the less noble "Dawson's Creek." After it ended, he wrote "Californication" as a film script, as a method to break writer's block, he says, which may mean his mind was free of industry constraints when he conceived Hank. Showtime liked the first 60 pages and convinced him to turn the script into a "dense half-hour" series about the redemption of a strong man in crisis.

"On television especially, you don't really see stories of people who have fallen in love and then out of love and then tried to get back to it. You see a lot of Cute-Meets and Happily Ever Afters. But, I mean, I think that's part of the problem with our culture ... it's largely crap."

Duchovny, a "Californication" executive producer, hopes people and the press don't "judge it superficially, morally -- that it's a show about a drug addict, or a show about a sex addict, all these tags you try to put on it because ... they might outrage somebody.

"It's a comedy. It's an adult comedy. It's not an adult acting like a 6-year-old, which is what most comedies are like."

Amen and hallelujah -- adults behaving like adults on TV. What a novel idea.