Californication aired from August 2007-? on the Showtime Cable Network.
"I?m disgusted with my life and myself, but I?m not unhappy about that" - Hank Moody
David Duchovny made a triumphant return to television in Californication, a fiery, raw and sexy comedy series which centured around novelist Hank Moody (Duchovny). Hank's obsession with honesty and his self-destructive behaviour - drinks, drugs and sex - were simultaneously destroying and enriching his career. He was just holding it together and he didn't mind it one bit.
The apple of Hank's eye was Becca (Madeleine Martin), his 13-year-old daughter with exgirlfriend Karen (Natascha McElhone). She was smart, possibly too smart for her wayward father, as Hank struggled to combine his duties as a father while still carrying a torch for her mother. Simultaneously, Hank was trying to re-launch his writing career after the dismal screenplay of his best-selling novel flopped. His agent, Charlie (Evan Handler), was desperate for Hank to put a stop to his compulsive behaviour and concentrate on writing new material but Hank was on a rollercoaster of ecstasy and he was going too fast to stop. All of this thrown in with a scandalous one night stand with Mia ( Madeline Zima), who just happened to be the teenage daughter of Karen's new boyfriend Bill ( Damian Young), made Hank's life very, very messy. Dani ( Rachel Miner) was Charlie's secretary who he was having sex with despite the fact that he was a married man.
A Review from Variety
Californication
(Series -- Showtime; Mon. Aug. 13, 10:30 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
Filmed in Los Angeles by Aggressive Mediocrity and Totally Commercial Films. Executive producers, Tom Kapinos, David Duchovny, Stephen Hopkins; co-executive producer, Melanie Greene; producer, Anne Kindberg; co-producer, Kate Garwood; director, Hopkins; writer, Kapinos;
Hank Moody - David Duchovny
Karen - Natascha McElhone
Becca - Madeleine Martin
Mia - Madeline Zima
Bill - Damian Young
Charlie - Evan Handler
David Duchovny just played a miserable screenwriter in Jake Kasdan's indie feature "The TV Set," so his role as a miserable, semi-blocked novelist in "Californication" falls into the same, rather peculiar niche. Seeking the same jaunty, jaundiced tone as Showtime's "Weeds" -- while incorporating attention-grabbing helpings of nudity and sex -- the premiere is watchable but not fully arousing, often feeling as clenched, dour and indecisive as its brooding protagonist.
The aptly named Hank Moody (Duchovny) ostensibly seems to have it all, bedding beautiful women and having seen his book, with the pretentious title "God Hates Us All," adapted into a successful movie -- starring "Katie and Tom," no less.
Unfortunately, Hank hated the movie, and he's finding it difficult putting two sentences together on paper -- largely because his beguiling ex Karen (Natascha McElhone) has left him, found a new mate and taken their 12-year-old daughter (Madeleine Martin) with her.
So while Hanks pines for Karen, he finds solace, as she puts it, by "sticking your dick in anything that moves trying to get back at me." There are certainly worse ways to pass the time, and this form of revenge allows for liberal glimpses of bared breasts (at least a half-dozen in the pilot, which isn't a bad breast-per-minute ratio), but not much in the way of emotional connection, either with Hank or anybody else.
As written by Tom Kapinos and directed by Stephen Hopkins, "Californication" (a pretty stupid title, really) has trouble delineating where the viewer's sympathies are supposed to reside. Hank doesn't need to be likable any more than Tony Soprano did, but watching him stagger through the premiere -- drinking too much, rudely insulting a fix-up by his agent (Evan Handler) and bedding women who are all inappropriate in various ways -- makes it increasingly difficult to care about his fate.
Perhaps that's why the best scene -- in which Hank confronts a lout who answers his cell phone during a movie -- feels like a cathartic throwaway, serving the dual purpose of having the show's protagonist finally do something that's easy to applaud.
Duchovny has always possessed underrated comedy chops, as evidenced by his brilliant guest shots on "The Larry Sanders Show." Still, his detached, distant qualities as an actor -- and in particular, as this character -- have the effect of sapping the show's vitality.
As for the already much-discussed sexual content, it's hardly racy enough to make anyone forget Duchovny's earlier stint as the lovelorn narrator of Showtime's "Red Shoe Diaries." Trying to have it both ways, those sequences appear designed to simultaneously titillate and convey Hank's emptiness, though seeing how quickly his conquests stack up brings to mind Woody Allen's line about how even "the wrong kind" of orgasm is still A-OK.
Tonally, the series feels like a logical companion to "Weeds" -- a show that's also star-driven and equally sour. At first blush, anyway, "Californication" isn't necessarily a bad place to be, but unless the series finds viable avenues to pursue beyond wallowing in Hank's self-pity, it'll be Showtime subscribers before long who wind up feeling screwed.
A Review from USA TODAY
Duchovny delights in 'Californication'
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
Who doesn't love a lovable rogue?
Ranging from dashing to dissolute, raffish womanizers have long been a staple of comedy, though few have ever been as desperately in need of redemption as Californication's Hank Moody. Smart, funny, almost despicably honest and seemingly eternally hung over, Hank is a blocked writer whose two conflicting goals are to bed every woman in sight and to win back the woman he lost.
Even more than most roles, Hank had to have been a challenge to cast. It wasn't enough to find a star who could do comedy and drama equally well. He also had to have enough sexual appeal to make us believe he could seduce so many women and enough charisma to stop us from resenting him for it.
How lucky for Californication that it found David Duchovny, who makes the unlikeliest twists believable and the most heinous behavior forgivable. And how lucky for Showtime that it found Californication, which may just be the perfect match for Weeds and gives Showtime one of the best sitcom combos on cable.
When we meet Hank, he's suffering from a crisis of faith brought on by a Hollywood system that turned his thoughtful novel God Hates Us All into a romantic comedy starring "Tom and Katie." His solution to his writer's block is to win back ex-girlfriend Karen (Natascha McElhone), the mother of his precocious 12-year-old daughter, Becca (Madeleine Martin). That will not prevent him, however, from having sex with a bookstore pickup played by an all-grown-up Madeline Zima, the youngest daughter in The Nanny.
He may be sexually loose, but Hank is not unprincipled, which helps keep the character from becoming reprehensible. This is a man who, when caught cheating with a married woman, pauses to give the husband a lesson in pleasuring his wife which while not nice is kind of noble. Or at least funny, as is a terrible blind date set up by his agent (Evan Handler).
If you haven't guessed by now, Californication is an adult comedy, and a premium cable one at that, so few holds are barred. The language is earthy, the situations border on the obscene (what is it with TV and nun fantasies this summer?), and partial nudity is not just expected, it's apparently required.
Granted, pay cable exists to give a paying audience what it wants. Still, exposing the breasts of four women in one half-hour does seem to go beyond freedom to exploitation. (You'd think at least the naked woman who got caught in bed by Hank's daughter would have covered up.) The show is not designed to appeal to prudes, but the writing and the acting are too good to be wasted on the prurient.
Just a word to the wise, Hank. A rogue, we like. A cad, not so much.
A Review from Entertainment Weekly
TV Review
Californication (2007)
B+
SEX AND THE PITY The naked truth is out there for David Duchovny in Californication
By Gillian Flynn
Join David Duchovny for an odyssey of self-loathing, despair, bitterness, and projectile vomit in Showtime's ''new comedy'' (huh, comedy?) Californication. Here, Los Angeles is a grotesque nihilopolis and Duchovny's writer Hank Moody is its pissy chronicler, indulging in cocktails and revenge sex and anonymous sex and angry sex and massive doses of wallowy self-pity: After seeing his brainy best-seller turned into a mindless date movie, the guy can't get it up, literarily speaking. He's losing his longtime partner (Solaris' Natascha McElhone) and precocious 12-year-old daughter (The Pillowman's Madeleine Martin) to a safe, boring rich guy whose teenage daughter he slept with, unknowingly.
Hank's a man in crisis, and the crisis is distinctly Duchovnyesque: sarcastic, understated, and buzzing with sly humor. This character, in fact, probably wouldn't work without Duchovny, so oft-infantile Hank is. As with his X-Files persona, the actor brings just enough playfulness, and a goodly amount of sorrow, to make Hank palatable. And bless McElhone's Karen, because if a woman that sensible and earthy still sort of loves the guy, it's a pretty solid voucher. She banters with Hank, brushes him off, rails against him and it's in those scenes that Hank becomes a real person, engaged in a genuine dissolution of love.
Unfortunately, all the sex in Californication overshadows the heart of the show. This is rarely frothy sex-romp stuff; this is dark. Sometimes poignant (anyone who saw Nicole Holofcener's L.A. drama Lovely and Amazing will notice echoes), but mostly dark. And that'd be fine, if it gave real insight into Hank. Who is this guy? He calls one lover a ''cadaverous lay,'' but then becomes gentle and sad when another conquest-to-be debates plastic surgery. He's kind to a woman who stands naked before him and demands to know her faults; but in another scene he verbally dismantles a blind date, stripping her down to a pitiful, pointless figure for sport. Certainly, it's brave to depict a serious jackass, and sure, we're all shades of gray, and yes, we're all entitled to moments of pure aggression toward the opposite sex. But Californication is so busy bopping and bumping and chest-thumping it doesn't go past these provocative glimpses. Several scenes of Hank's blasι cruelty toward women seem intended to be funny: They cross the line just like HBO's Entourage has of late, where women aren't in on the joke anymore, but the butt of it. At one point, Hank wearily blogs: ''Why is L.A. so bent on destroying its female population?'' But he seems equally bent on that mission. Californication is flirting with incredibly interesting questions about the state of male-female relations here's hoping it actually gets there.B
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