The TV Zone

Talented guy. Needs a shave.

Because David Duchovny series don't come along every day and because we've got to wait a couple more years until the next "X Files" movie, I think I'll take this little opportunity to talk about "Californication", which premieres Monday on Showtime.

He's also an executive producer of the series (inmates in charge of the asylum again!) I've had a first look and am here to tell you that this may not be the moment to finally get that Showtime subscription.

Not to be confused with that old Red Hot Chili Peppers album…actually, maybe it IS supposed to confused with that old album, because it too is about sex, death, drugs and booze. There's a lot of very dirty talk here, a requisite for HBO/Showtime comedies, and plenty of nudity (more requisites).

There's an overall "Day of the Locust" theme - the artist dreamer comes west, gets corrupted, hates himself, etc. etc. Duchovny's Hank - a blocked writer who can't "produce so much as a...predicate" - fills his days and (mostly) nights with drink, drugs and casual sex, and admits that "I'm disgusted with my life and myself, but I'm not unhappy about that..."

He wrote a book, "Good Hates us All," that was inverted into a movie ("This Crazy Little Thing Called Love") as only Hollywood can invert a movie. He's also got an ex (Natascha McElhone) whom he never actually married and a twelve-year-old daughter, too, and when he’s not dreaming about sex with nuns, Hank’s dreaming about a bucolic middle-class family life.

Problem? Duchovny wants Hank to be heroic on some level, but he's so unidimensional, and so caustically unsympathetic, that he's checkmates himself. Meanwhile, the trope of the debauched Hollywood writer who left his talent and self-esteem back in New York is so old, so over-worked, that it's now pretty much impossible to infuse freshness, much less comedy, into this kind of character, even with a guy like Duchovny at the helm.

So I still await that breakthrough comedy from this talented guy…