I Like to Watch

Aug. 5, 2007 | Everyone tells you to slow down and enjoy life, but they don't explain who's going to pay the bills and shake the crumbs out of the toaster while you're moving at half speed. Personally, I know that if I stop and smell the roses, I usually end up lying around in some rose bed all day while my boss tries desperately to reach me on my cellphone.

And most of the time, I don't even smell roses. I smell financial liabilities and unfinished to-do lists, a smell not unlike burnt toast. For me, free time means rehashing old conversations or worrying about how much I should be saving for retirement.

Seizing the day is a slippery slope for old people like me. Once you're old enough to fully grasp just how short life is, you're constantly tempted to hop the next plane to Italy and max out your credit cards on really good pasta and Chianti. But you're also old enough to know that if you don't sublimate those urges, the dog won't get fed and the toaster will fill up with crumbs and then burst into flames and burn the house down at the exact moment when the fire insurance expires because the bill went unpaid for too long.

Mind of the unmarried man
This tension between responsibility and hedonistic self-indulgence strikes at the tumultuous heart of Showtime's "Californication" (premieres at 10:30 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 13, after the return of "Weeds"). The half-hour comedy stars David Duchovny as novelist Hank Moody, a horny middle-aged guy who handles writer's block by cruising for hot younger chicks. He's having a reasonably exciting time, albeit in a drunken, self-deprecating, wishy-washy sort of way, but his escapades feel increasingly unsavory as his own daughter approaches her teen years.

In fact, Hank Moody is the kind of character who would be wildly unlikable if anyone but Duchovny played him. He drinks too much, behaves like your standard overconfident asshole, occasionally pines for his ex-girlfriend Karen (Natascha McElhone), who has long since moved, and mumbles incoherently about his inability to write. "Writers write. That's what they do," says Hank. "Me, not so much. Nada, nothing." Worst of all, he optioned his novel "God Hates Us All," and some studio made it into a movie ("starring Tom and Katie") called "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Next up, a film version of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" titled "Careless Whisper"...

But Duchovny not only makes Hank forgivable, he makes him lovable. Like Bill Clinton stopping by McDonald's for a Happy Meal in the middle of his morning jog or holding forth on honor and dignity while getting a blow job under his desk, Duchovny effortlessly embodies a charming mix of idealism and the lost boy repeatedly led into temptation. If Hank winked and acted as if his weaknesses were vaguely adorable (see also: "Mind of the Married Man"), he'd get on our nerves, big time. Instead, Hank is a nice mix of cynical, vulnerable and vaguely self-hating, grounded by the self-possessed, down-to-earth quality Duchovny brings to every role.

"Californication" is reasonably charming straight out of the gate, and as the story progresses, the intelligence of the writing gains traction. One night out on the town, Hank's friends set him up with a woman, Meredith, who's clearly not his type. When Meredith urges Hank to tell her about herself so she doesn't have to tell him ("I mean, that's what writers do, right? They make up stuff?"), he gets a twinkle in his eye as his two friends shrink in their seats. Soon, Hank is making a series of elaborate liquor-fueled guesses about who she is and what she does for a living. Even though we've seen this scene before in other movies, the moment has a fresh feeling of devastation and recklessness:

"You had a serious boyfriend in college, broke up right after, he married the next one. You got a low-maintenance gig in the human resources industry, had a string of bad relationships. You put on some weight. You looked around and saw all your friends starting to pair up and get married, so you decided you should lose the weight. You joined a gym ... maybe you did a little running. You say you want to work, maybe start your own party-planning business, you fancy yourself a poor gal's Martha Stewart? But what you really wanna do is sit at home, on the couch, with some poor sap, watching reality TV while he watches you get fat again."

Come on, now, be fair. Isn't that every girl's dream?

You can tell by Meredith's face that Hank has hit his mark. "That's so mean, but it's exactly the sort of thing a writer would say," I tell my poor sap of a husband.

"Yeah, that was clever. I bet a writer wrote that!" he replies. Ouch!

So maybe "Californication" is just another self-indulgent story told by yet another self-indulgent writer, but with so much sex, booze and mean-spiritedness in the air, it's hard not to enjoy all of it. The moral seems to be that you can have everything you want, you can indulge all of your urges and focus completely on enjoying yourself, but it still might not make you happy.

Hey, wait a minute -- isn't that the moral of "Mad Men," too? There must be a lot of unhappy TV writers out there. Apparently life in the rose bed isn't exactly a bed of roses...

Next page: "He's obsessive-compulsive. He's neurotic. He's a loose cannon"