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Californication: Slip Of The Tongue

By fred | September 7, 2008

(S02E01) Here’s another series that will be returning to our screen in a few weeks. The sophomore season of Californication might only premiere by the end of September but I got the occasion to watch the season premiere already, and despite my dislike of the first season I sure wasn’t going to pass on the occasion. While the show as been mostly heard of recently in the headlines, as star David Duchovny is being treated for a sex addiction, ironically enough, let’s only focus on Hank and those in his life.

Last season, after a pilot episode that I felt was pretty good and promising, the show went downhill and it never really did it for me, only to end with one of the crappiest finale ever that felt utterly out of character, for the show, for the people involved, for everyone and everything. It almost reminded me of the first season premiere of Heroes in sort ruining-everything-done-before sort of way.

Still, I did watch this new season premiere, and I’m glad I did.

I really am, because while I won’t pretend the show suddenly all got amazing, it was actually good. Sure, there are still things that don’t really work for me, and I see two mains problems with the show at this point.

For starter, we have its premise, what it comes from, and that is… that first season premiere ! Back when we left the show, Hank’s ex-girlfriend was about to get married, no wait, scratch that, she actually did got married, only to jump in Hank’s car and run away within the 10 first minutes or her marriage, at most. That was stupid, that was stupid and out of character, after spending one season rambling how she’s over him and wants to be married to that guy she loves.

So now the show opens and we have our new couple, and everyone around seems to find that situation completely normal. There’s not even a mention of that off fact that she is a married woman, only not to Hank, but to that other guy. Yes, I say “that guy”, because no one seems to care for poor Bill, he’s pretty much not even mentioned once, no one cares. Is he going to get a divorce, or an annulment ? Why isn’t Karen trying to get that done if she wants to move on in her life and be with Hank ?

For someone who’s never watch the show before, I think none of this would matter and they’d enjoy the episode all the better, but if you watched the first season, that incredible void is like a giant lack of continuity, and hopefully it will be addressed soon.

To go on with where this episode begins, we also that what I find to be a completely absurd situation : Hank, recognized author who got known with a pretty successful best-seller turned into a feature film starring “Tom & Katie”, no less, wrote a brand new hit. Only, it was stolen by a 16 year old girl, and she had the book published. She comes out of nowhere, writes a future best-seller with a style “resembling” the one of Hank’s, she happens to be the daughter of the new husband of Hank’s ex-girlfriend, and no one wonders, no one is pissed, no one cares.

Anyways, if you try to forget about this, this episode was actually pretty good. As I said, I had really liked the pilot episode, it felt like a really fun (and provocative) little show, and watching this episode felt much the same. The episode flew by in no time, I really thought I didn’t had the entire episode, but it’s just that it was so good you want it to last longer, because it’s fun, funny on occasion, and it has the same provocative and sexually obsessive tone you’ve known & liked from last season.

But that’s also the second problem I had with the episode actually : at times, it feels like they’re trying so much, too much, to be provocative, to be irreverent, and it shows. It doesn’t feel natural, it feels fake. On a few occasion during this episode, I was really under the impression that they wanted to remind everyone this wasn’t your clean little show in a big network, so it was filled with drugs and sex and naked girls, but it felt forced.

In the last scene of the episode, we find Hank & Karen in a discussion with somebody else, and that entire “conversation” is a mess. There’s not one bit of it that felt natural, at any point. Especially things coming from Karen’s mouth felt incredibly forced and completely fake, she sounded like she didn’t meant any of that and wasn’t even in the situation. Duchovny’s acting was better, but that whole scene felt off, fake and forced, while it should have felt like the natural and expected behavior for those characters.

In the end, I’m not sure this season will be any better than the last one, but at least it should have a pretty good start, especially if you don’t think too much about what’s going on overall, and if you did like the first season, chances are you’ll like this one as well, at least you should find this episode to be all you wanted and more from the show.

Californication returns Sunday, September 28th at 10.30 on Showtime.

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Californication