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Honest Look at Marriage? You Mean That Sex Show?
Jane Alexander, left, with Tim DeKay and Ally Walker in the HBO series “Tell Me You Love Me.”By MARGY ROCHLIN
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — HBO’s new one-hour relationship drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” won’t have its premiere until Sept. 9, but if DVDs of the 10-part series are enjoying marathon viewings in Hollywood, it might have something to do with how it was labeled before a single frame had been shot.
“It was known as ‘the pornography show,’ ” said Ally Walker, who never had to worry about taking her clothes off on “Profiler,” the NBC psychic detective series and plays Katie in “Tell Me You Love Me.” “One of my agents said: ‘You’re not going to want to do this. There’s lots of nudity.’ ”
Ms. Walker’s agent was correct about the amount of racy scenes in “Tell Me You Love Me.” “Honest” is how Cynthia Mort, the creator and an executive producer of “Tell Me You Love Me,” preferred to describe the show when she first pitched her concept to HBO: a close look at four committed couples, ranging from their 20s to their 60s.
She said: “I told them: ‘These are people’s lives and they have a lot of sex or don’t have sex. I don’t want a show where in the middle of this emotional real moment you have some stupid cutaway to a lamp. That won’t work.” She also promised HBO one thing that viewers would never ever see — extramarital infidelity. “This show is about people who want to stay together,” Ms. Mort said. “I told them, ‘No one will ever have an affair.’ ”
Even for HBO, though, the explicit nature of the sex scenes pushes the envelope when it comes to nudity and intimate camera angles. That said, the vibe of “Tell Me You Love Me” is less Zalman King’s gauzy soft-core “Red Shoe Diaries” than something befitting the director John Cassavetes’s probing, naturalistic films about men and women.
Shot almost entirely with hand-held cameras in Super 16 millimeter, the show has no opening titles or bouncy incidental music; aside from the sexual encounters, it’s not even particularly plot heavy. Instead “Tell Me You Love Me” is a peeling-the-onion sort of series about the difficulties of being in a long-term relationship: the miscommunications, the tiny betrayals and the constant assessing of which partner is sacrificing more for the good of the team.
Many of these issues are revealed as the couples sit side by side on a gray couch in the sparsely decorated office of Dr. May Foster (Jane Alexander), a poised, snowy-haired therapist they’re seeing in hope of repairing their eroding relationships. It is part of the quirky integrity of the show that viewers get a glimpse of the sex life of the therapist too. Maybe it’s because Dr. Foster’s marriage of 43 years is solid, and she has no privacy-draining children.
Meanwhile, because Ms. Walker’s Katie is a middle-aged mother of two, she spends much of the series padding around the family home in baggy casual wear, emotionally adrift and wondering why she and her genial husband (Tim DeKay) become total strangers when they close the door of the master bedroom.
It was roughly three years ago that Ms. Mort, a film and television writer who began her career as a supervising producer on the ABC blue-collar comedy “Roseanne,” started noticing how many of her married friends rejected the notion of divorce, but seemed to be unhappy. “I began to wonder when two people who spend their lives together, have kids or don’t have kids but are in love, are no longer able to reach across the bed and touch each other,” Ms. Mort said. “What happened in that space? That’s what I wanted to dismantle and put back together.”
But would HBO executives, accustomed to scheduling big, polished, glossy dramas like “Rome” and “Deadwood,” think that this was the type of show that would help them fill the post-“Sopranos” void? Even Ms. Mort was not sure until she received a call from HBO’s president for entertainment, Carolyn Strauss. “I knew they were into it because she said, ‘Look, it’s not going to be easy, but we’re up for it if you are.’ ”
When asked what it was like months and months later, to view the eye-popping footage borne of this arrangement, Ms. Strauss said: “Obviously it’s always very, like, ‘Whoa!’ But I think it’s all in the language of a relationship. It’s not there to be prurient. We talked about it a lot prior to. It wasn’t anything that was shocking. We knew what we were going to get.”
Of course even if all the physically graphic content were excised from “Tell Me You Love Me,” the series would still feel different from most other television shows. While it’s filmed on location in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, the actual city where the action takes place is never identified. And though everyone is gainfully employed, what the characters do for a living is almost tangential.
“I wanted a voyeuristic feel,” Ms. Mort said about the tone she was aiming for. “That was important to me, just being there with a person.”
Adam Scott, who plays Palek, a young real estate investor who is working on having a child with his high-powered-lawyer wife, described a scene where a character sits in her car watching her boyfriend roam through a gas station convenience store. “There’s no music,” Mr. Scott said in a telephone interview. “You just hear the sounds of the gas station and what it sounds like in the inside of a car when you’re waiting for someone to come back from buying their soda. The show feels like it’s comprised of things that happen between scenes on other shows, things you recognize from life — not things you recognize from television or movies.”
Mr. Scott’s point is made no better than in the counseling session scenes where seemingly pleasant exchanges — “So, what’s going on?” “Uh, not much. How about you?” — soon open the floodgates on painful revelations. In these scenes the long, queasy silences and the tight voices and stricken expressions on the faces of the couples are authentic enough to assume that Ms. Mort had had her own adventures in therapy.
“Oh, off and on,” Ms. Mort replied with a light wave of her hand. “I’m slightly crazy, but not in a dramatic way. But, yeah, I think there’s value in it.”
At the time Ms. Mort said this, she was eating a piece of buttered wheat toast as she sat slumped in an easy chair in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont Hotel here. Perhaps in deference to a hotel guest who sat nearby typing on a laptop, Ms. Mort would whisper or even silently mouth the parts of her answers that contained salty language. But what others might consider controversial, she sees matter-of-factly.
“Immediately what you feel with certain pitches is a point of view from the person who is going to execute the work. I think certainly with Cynthia that’s what you felt,” Ms. Strauss said when asked why HBO was willing to gamble on Ms. Mort, who at 47 has never overseen a series by herself and is HBO’s first female show runner. “She came in, and she knew exactly what she wanted to talk about. There’s a couple of people you just know. You just go: ‘You know what? We’ll roll the dice. We’ll see what happens.’ ”
But television executives are one thing. What will others think of “Tell Me You Love Me”? “I don’t know how critics will respond,” Ms. Mort said. “I’m sure they’ll want to talk about Jane, that we dare to show 60-somethings au naturel. But what are you going to do?” Would she be insulted, Ms. Mort was asked, if interest in the choreography and running time of the sex scenes overshadowed any discussion of the series’ more serious intentions as a raw television drama about the trials of monogamy?
“I won’t be offended,” Ms. Mort said with a laugh. “But I will be a little irritated.”
HBO gets raw -- or is it raunchy? -- with sexually explicit 'Tell Me You Love Me'
By Scott CollinsJuly 14, 2007
LARRY DAVID doesn't fall in love easily — he's not that kind of guy — but this week he may have found a TV show to swoon over.
At the semiannual television press tour in Beverly Hills, a reporter asked the tetchy, misanthropic comic what he thought of HBO's upcoming series about the amorous travails of three middle-class couples, "Tell Me You Love Me," which already has critics buzzing over its super-explicit sex scenes. David looked perplexed until Jeff Garlin, the beefy and unctuous Sancho Panza to David's ectomorphic and prickly Quixote on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," turned to his costar onstage and explained that "Tell Me" would be chockablock with "bosoms and things."
David brightened. "I'm in favor of that!" he announced.
Bosoms and things: That's not exactly a plot summary of "Tell Me," but it's not a bad place to start. Because that's where many viewers will start. Whatever else it may or may not be, "Tell Me," at least in its current form, will set a new precedent for prime-time TV when it has its premiere Sept. 9: No previous series, on pay cable or anywhere else, has dared show anything even close to this much skin; the climax, if you will, of the first episode finds a woman (Sonya Walger) in her 30s masturbating her husband (Adam Scott) to orgasm, with the entire act and all relevant body parts plainly visible. Even Jane Alexander — yes, that Jane Alexander, the snow-domed, regally poised 67-year-old former chief of the National Endowment for the Arts — drops trousers for some frisky senior sex.
Really, it brings a smile to one's face: What enchantment is in store for Larry David!
But in going, um, all the way with its latest highly touted drama, HBO had better hope there are lots and lots of viewers in the market for bosoms and things. Because in most other ways, this is not the sexiest of times for America's most-watched pay cable outlet.
"The Sopranos," by far the network's top-rated show, is history. "John From Cincinnati," a mystical surfing drama that's left many viewers scratching their heads, has sunk like an anchor, ratings-wise. The hip musical-comedy "Flight of the Conchords" has achieved only cult status so far. Meanwhile, a rejiggered HBO management team is still adjusting to the bright lights after the sudden exit of longtime Chief Executive Chris Albrecht, a savvy and charismatic programmer who was busted in a domestic abuse incident in May. It now looks as if the company won't even be able to deliver the made-for-TV movies that execs promised would wrap up the loose plot strands of its unceremoniously dumped neo-Western, "Deadwood."
Rumors abound in Hollywood that the departure of "The Sopranos" has signaled to subscribers that it's time to bail, threatening as a result the network's much-vaunted profits and cushy production budgets, which have for many years been the envy of rival executives.
But HBO officials insist this is not the case. They say that people don't sign up just for shows like "The Sopranos" (to which I say: the heck they don't). New Co-President Richard Plepler, who was formerly the PR czar, told reporters this week that the network has 30 million subscribers, which translates into a modest 6% gain compared with what the network reported 18 months ago (although it should be noted that HBO subscriber metrics are notoriously difficult to parse, and I found the same 30 million figure in some news stories dating to at least 2001, although other reports used lower numbers).
"This year, we probably spent more on series programming than any year in the past," HBO programming President Michael Lombardo told the critics, without supplying specifics.
Free from the government-mandated content restrictions that bind broadcasters, not to mention the advertiser queasiness that keeps basic cable networks reasonably well-behaved, HBO's stock in trade is letting it all hang out. Its original programming got famous by pushing at the boundaries on the old eros-thanatos axis; what you're promised is either naughtier ("Sex and the City") or bloodier ("The Sopranos") than what those old fogies at CBS, or anywhere else, will give you.
Writers and producers have internalized all this, and it's ammunition for their efforts to tiptoe ever further: C'mon, HBO! Don't wimp out now! Cynthia Mort, a former "Roseanne" writer who is "Tell Me's" creator and executive producer, said to me that when HBO executives threw up warning flags about the intensity of the sex scenes, she rebutted them by wondering why it was OK to show rapes and other mayhem on "The Sopranos" but not intimate relations between a married couple. (The tactic proved effective, she added.) When screening the series internally, officials rendered the premises harassment-litigation-proof by dividing attendees according to gender.
Now faced with promoting the series, the network is doing a 180, pretending that the sex doesn't matter, as if only perverts and rich, aging comedy writers won't be able to see that "Tell Me" is not about smokin' sex but rather intimacy and trust and other topics familiar to anyone who's ever endured couples therapy.
As HBO Entertainment President Carolyn Strauss said in an interview, "The point isn't to be prurient. The point is to show the language of intimacy."
Or, as Mort told me: "I didn't realize people would be so focused on the sex." (An experiment: Try to read that quote aloud in the mirror without breaking a smile.)
From a marketing standpoint, HBO's tack might prove a miscalculation. Of course it remains to be seen whether viewers will find the relationships on "Tell Me" utterly addictive, or whether they'll just turn up for the TV equivalent of a booty call (the network is already comparing the series with the talky and difficult films of cult director John Cassavetes, which doesn't exactly scream mainstream hit).
But Hype 101 says that HBO should be embracing its inner slut, not running away from it. One can only imagine how a true genius of promotional hokum, like a Harvey Weinstein or a David Merrick, say, might mold this very raw material: Walger's magic fingers adorning bus ads nationwide, perhaps?
Then again, it's entirely understandable if beleaguered HBO execs are feeling a bit squeamish. You can push boundaries only so far before they begin to push back, and maybe imprison. A TV network should be known for putting the best shows on the air, and that quest can get obscured when performers are reduced to telling reporters, as "Tell Me's" Michelle Borth did this week, "We're actors, not porn stars!"
"It's not TV. It's HBO" is a good slogan. "Bosoms and things"? Well, not so much.
