Steamy and Stimulating
HBO's 'Tell Me You Love Me' Takes an Intimate Look at Human Sexuality

Jane Alexander portrays a couples therapist who practices what she preaches in the sexually explicit HBO drama about three couples, premiering tomorrow.

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 8, 2007; C01

Come for the sex; stay for the stories. That, to put it bluntly, is a reasonable way to approach "Tell Me You Love Me," a fleshy new HBO drama series that puts things quite bluntly itself.

Despite the big stir that has preceded the show -- over the candor and frequency of its sex scenes -- this is high-class filmmaking, not high-gloss porno. The sex scenes are, indeed, unusually explicit and include both male and female frontal nudity (with some use of prostheses), and though at first blush viewers might feel there are lulls between close encounters, the sex scenes soon seem seamlessly integrated, as well as strikingly intimate.

The series -- centering on three troubled couples who seek the help of a therapist -- would be provocative even if the sex were less sexy and stayed within the boundaries of standard television. But as HBO likes to keep reminding us, what it dispenses is usually not standard television. "Tell Me" could only have come from the network that produced, among other bold series, "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos," although it's by no means a copy of any of them.

"Tell Me You Love Me" is not only more provocative than any of the broadcast networks' new fall shows, but also more sophisticated -- even than those shows that aspire to be "adult."

Little time is wasted in getting down to nitty or gritty. The first sex scene occurs a mere 90 seconds into the premiere, and the fact that the man's wife is not in the room during sex is hugely relevant, of course, and key to her decision to head to "couples therapist" May Foster -- portrayed by series star and luminous veteran Jane Alexander (who has professional and personal ties to Arena Stage).

Katie (Ally Walker, doing the most elegant acting in the ensemble) and husband David (bland Tim DeKay) have not had sex since their 11th wedding anniversary, and their 12th is right around the corner. David is in denial about anything being wrong, and so Katie has to attend the first therapy sessions alone.

The camera doesn't just love Walker; it is fascinated by her, sometimes even spellbound. She has a difficult scene in the second episode -- Katie attempts self-gratification on advice from Dr. Foster -- that could have been mortifying, but instead is brought off credibly.

Palek (Adam Scott) and Carolyn (Sonya Walger) have no problems with fornication but have flopped at procreation, a fact that is driving them both to more than mere distraction. Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby) and Jamie (Michelle Borth) are engaged but stumble into a crisis: monogamy panic. Hugo keeps asking Jamie whether she can really imagine never being attracted to another man for the next 60 years, meaning that he is having trouble imagining himself being faithful.

The show probably sounds pat to describe it this way -- one little, two little, three little relationships -- but it is rife with subtleties and insight.

Couples watching the show together might squirm initially, but not because the sex is staged to be hotsy-totsy stuff. Where the show becomes discomforting is when it explores the therapist's own sexual relationship with her mate; both are in their 60s. The filmmakers want us to be aware that sex is not something restricted to the young and the cute, and so if you're inclined to think "gross" at the sight of the couple in bed, you've only helped the filmmakers prove a point.

The goal is verisimilitude, not titillation, but that's not to say this is a stuffy or scholarly look at sex. It's just an impressively honest and open one.

Maybe it helps that the series was conceived, and many episodes written, by a woman: Cynthia Mort, also one of the executive producers. Patricia Rozema directed many episodes. Tomorrow night's pilot was filmed in Manitoba, Canada, and although the other nine episodes were shot in Los Angeles, the environment throughout appears oddly wintry and bleak.

In addition, the couples are white and affluent and live in coldly modern houses. They seem to be occupying the same sterile territory as the characters in Francois Truffaut's futuristic fantasy "Fahrenheit 451." The icy austerity borders on forbidding.

In virtually every other way, however, "Tell Me You Love Me" has the makings of an HBO blockbuster. Far more important, it promises to be an enlightening and enlightened look at human sexuality -- very human and very, very sexual.

'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

Larry David is up to his old tricks, but there is no great clamor in the land for him to learn new ones. The sixth-season premiere of his punishingly funny comedy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- tomorrow night on HBO -- hums and strums along as if David and company had never taken a hiatus and the show had never gone away. If life were perfect, it never would.

But then, if life were perfect, David wouldn't have much to be funny about. As usual, David as David is always at odds and sometimes at war with the world, and if he momentarily runs out of windmills to tilt at, a windmill will appear out of nowhere and come tilting at him.

"I've been apologizing to people since I was 6 years old, on a daily basis," David says in the third of three new episodes sampled. No one familiar with the character could wonder why.

David says that just before stealing flowers from a roadside memorial to Ida Funkhouser, mother of Larry's friend Marty and victim of a reckless driver who ran over her wheelchair. Actually, she might have been the reckless one; we are mercifully spared the accident itself.

Get the picture? No? Then you might not be accustomed to David territory. Some of David's betes noires go back to his days as co-creator of "Seinfeld," such as his paranoid obsession with dry cleaners and the worldwide dry-cleaner conspiracy. (In West L.A., where David lives, there is literally no limit to the amount of time people will spend at the dry cleaners, fussing over a stain or a smudge.)

In the second episode -- particularly insane and hilarious -- David rails against what he sees as "complete chaos in the dry-cleaning industry" involving purposely misplaced garments. Other matters that factor in the first three shows: a homeless family that David, on insistence from wife Cheryl (the formidable Cheryl Hines), has imported from a hurricane-devastated city; a seemingly foolproof device for avoiding dull parties (so foolproof that it fails miserably, twice); the hidden virtue of making "anonymous" charitable donations -- so long as you tell everybody who "anonymous" really is; and a novel new definition of adultery concocted by Susie Greene against her hapless husband, Jeff.

Susie is played, as usual, with awesome ferocity by Susie Essman and Jeff by Jeff Garlin. Guest stars in that second episode include California Sen. Barbara Boxer; Vivica A. Fox as a chain-smoking member of the hurricane family; and the fundamentally gorgeous Gina Gershon as Anna, a dry cleaner who gets the giggles -- and who can blame her? The giggles are the least of it. Google "giggles" and Larry David's puss might pop up. Same, perhaps, with "guffaws."

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" is this kind of perversely riotous comedy: As much as you may love it, you can completely understand somebody else hating it. It's fortunate that the show is "one of a kind" because more than one would be too many. Then again, probably nobody but Larry David could concoct it.

It's "pritty good," as Larry likes to say. Pritty, pritty, pritty good. In fact, pritty great.

Tell Me You Love Me (one hour) premieres tomorrow night at 9 on HBO, followed by Curb Your Enthusiasm (30 minutes).