I rewatched Californication, a few years ago, in that most destructive way possible, a binge-watch. Of course, a binge sort of fits well with a show that is full of alcoholic benders, of drug addiction, sex addiction, and every kind of lasciviousness and ribaldry. I'll say one thing for the binge. Set against the other show I binged then, espionage drama The Americans, Californication came on like a great sunrise, in total contrast to the former's dourness. Californication is soaked in the Californian sun, it is replete with gorgeous people, beautiful homes, sports cars, fashionable restaurants and bars, and that most life affirming of sinful acts, sexual intercourse. It is (was) a tonic after all those 1980s Washington shenanigans.
Leaving the much vaunted The Americans to one side, what about this one on its own terms? The first season is the strongest, with the richest story scenario. No surprise, really. In Season Two matters are undone in order to create complications for our entertainment. It is contrived and very vulgar. The third season improves, the show settling into being a bawdy and riotous sex comedy. The hero, Hank Moody, sees his - what is the expression? - chickens come home to roost in Season Four. Just as with Season One, which is a stand alone season, Season Four also has a conclusive end, and one could drop the show at the end. Yet, there were three more seasons still to come.
I'd say it's worth seeing the lot, despite the weaknesses of Seasons 5-6, and the increasingly coarse language in Season Seven. The main reason is the screenwriting, which despite the story weaknesses, remains remarkably witty, right through until the satisfying final episode. Californication, for all its explicitness, is delightfully playful, from beginning to end. It is FUN, and fun in movies and TV shows is becoming more and more important to me as the second quarter of the new century continues to strike me as sulky, po-faced, faux-didactic and pseudo-serious. That tiresome obsession with sending messages of commitment, social, political, environmental - of lecturing the audience, boring us to tears. Californication has no desire to do anything other than entertain, and thank heavens for that.
David Duchovny will probably be best remembered, in the long term, for The X Files. Ok, but his character here, Hank Moody, the almost washed-up New York novelist adrift on a river of p***y in Los Angeles, shows him at his most charismatically confident. The show also has that rarest of things, a precocious teenage daughter character who is not a pain in everyone's backside, but rather someone empathetic and relatably human. There is also the comic pleasure of watching Hank's agent, Charlie Runckle (Evan handler) weeping at least once every season. Trust me, he's a hoot.
This show is almost a cousin to Charlie Sheen's sitcom, Two and a Half Men. It will also satisfy anyone who thinks Tarantino's rude wit dried up after Pulp Fiction. Like early QT it also has a banging soundtrack, classic rock through to contemporary noise bands, but its signature song is Rocket Man. Don't misunderstand Mr Hank Moody, he's not the man they think at all (oh no, no, no). He's a chivalrous soak, a knight without his lady, a hero who disdains the court. A rebel knight, a rogue hero, but a hero all the same. Come and say hello.
