Unsexy unsexual healing
Speaking of making it work, since the unsavory sex scenes and monotonous, mumbly couples therapy sessions of "Tell Me You Love Me" probably drove you screaming in the other direction weeks ago, let me tell you how it all turned out, OK? (Don't read this if you plan to catch up with this show some day -- although I'd strongly caution you against wasting your time.) Carolyn (Sonya Walger) finally got pregnant after whining about it for a full year, only to have her wussy husband Palek (Adam Scott) discover (through therapy!) that he really didn't want to be a father. And also through the miracles of therapy, he started to wake up to how self-involved and irritating his wife was. So, what to do? Palek made the reasonable choice and walked out on a hysterical, knocked-up Carolyn (just like his dad left him and his mom, don'tcha know!). Needless to say, this had to be the most satisfying scene of the entire season.
But then Carolyn had a miscarriage, so Palek went back to her. Bad, depressing, dreary, those two. Meanwhile, Katie (Ally Walker) and David (Tim DeKay) continued to struggle with their impoverished sex life and vaguely lame marriage, but when David stopped mumbling and started talking about his feelings, Katie decided she a) wanted a baby, b) wanted a job, c) wanted David to leave her, and finally d) wanted to share a gloriously uplifting mutual masturbation session with him, an unpleasant scene that may have been liberating for Katie and David's marriage, but which made the viewers at home want a divorce.
Meanwhile, Jaime (Michelle Borth) broke up with her cute boyfriend and got back together with Hugo (Luke Kirby), but it's OK because Jaime spent about three milliseconds alone, during which she learned that she's never really been single before because she can't stand to be without a boyfriend, and yet she cheats on all of her boyfriends. In case we were in the dark about any of this, Jaime laid it all out for us in one of her therapy sessions:
"You know, I've spent so long in relationships that I don't know ... It's like I have no lines, no boundaries. And it never used to bother me before but now it drives me crazy, now I want to run. But I'm afraid to run because I'm afraid to be alone, so I stay, only now I'm like this blob who can really fuck, and there's no ... There's nothing."
This is what we call on-the-nose dialogue. It leaves nothing to the imagination. Yes, this is a therapy session, and yes, we've waded through eight or nine episodes just to get to the point where Jaime might admit these things to herself (while they were painfully clear to us all along, thanks to scene after scene where Jaime demonstrates her trouble with boundaries), but even so, this sort of talk isn't interesting or artful. It's like having a woman eating cake for nine episodes, and then in the 10th she says, "You know, I feel sick all the time because I eat too much cake." Actually, that sounds pretty entertaining, by comparison.
Anyway, that's about it for this show. And to be fair, the last two episodes were reasonably entertaining, but only because the characters were talking instead of rolling their eyes and sulking, and something actually happened during the course of each hour. Basically, "Tell Me You Love Me" is a 10-episode series that would've been reasonably interesting (although not painless or provocative in a good way) if it had been edited down to the length of a long movie, say, two or three hours.
Incredibly enough, this show is coming back for a second season, presumably so we can see the same gaggle of tedious mouth breathers through their next marital crises.
Closing remarks
By next year, though, we'll have even less time for tedious mouth breathers, because we'll have socks to darn and coupons to clip and tomato plants to propagate. But we'll feel thankful! Thankful for our mediocre jobs, thankful for our median incomes, thankful that we made enough soup to last all week, just like our working-stiff neighbors. Do they stay up at night, asking themselves if they'll ever be rich and travel the world, eating expensive foods? No. They read used books and bake bread and mail letters and plant flowers and life is beautiful.
This Thanksgiving, we'll try to be more like them. All we need is a roof over our bad haircuts and a place to hang our unfashionable hats. (And a TiVo and an iPod and a good coffeemaker.)
Next week... "Notes From the Underbelly" and "The Amazing Race" demonstrate the volatile joys of family.
About the writer
Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic. She also maintains the rabbit blog. You can find more of her columns in the I Like To Watch directory.
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