Say, Darling, Is It Frigid in Here? By ALESSANDRA STANLEY The New York Times August 19, 2007
THE next big thing is conjugal sex. "Tell Me You Love Me," an HBO drama that will begin in September, has already gotten a lot of advance attention by paying a lot of attention to the advances couples make - and don't make - in bed. It's more sexually explicit than any show on television, but the series is also more clinical than erotic, more analytical than dramatic: scenes from a few marriages that hinge, or collapse, on sexual intercourse. (More, if you count the white-haired therapist and her geri-priapic husband.) Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" was first shown in Europe as a mini-series before it was turned into a movie in 1973, and both versions were scandalous and disturbing. HBO's tales of marital strife have less Scandinavian gloom and intensity but some of the original's gravity and voyeurism - Bergman Lite. The series can be considered groundbreaking, if only for its nudity and graphic depictions of sex, but it is nevertheless quite chaste in its intentions. Struggling to recapture its primacy in the post-"Sopranos" era, HBO chose a sexually daring but sober, often quite depressing meditation on Marriage, American Style. HBO is not alone. There is a noticeable shift in emphasis this season, a darkening of mood away from the premarital frolics of blind dates, Manolo Blahniks and Central Perk hookups to closely watched midmarriage malaise. Almost any television drama touches on connubial tension and sexual miscues; it crops up all over, in family melodramas like "Brothers and Sisters" on ABC, police procedurals like "Law & Order: SVU" on NBC and even courtroom thrillers like "Damages" on FX. But until now most series lacked either the interest or the patience to probe those intimacies too closely. The last time television took so unhurried and earnest a look at spousal relations was 20 years ago, on "Thirtysomething." Suddenly a renewed fascination with matrimony spans the spectrum from premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime to even the flimsiest of celebrity reality shows on VH1. Colder, unsentimental, almost cruel in their gaze, these shows have replaced the solipsistic pillow talk between Hope and Michael on "Thirtysomething" with tableaus of repression and neurosis. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/arts/television/19stan.html?ex=1345176000&en=b9511b75fcdeeadb&ei=5090
