Tom Kapinos’s comedy about a blocked novelist in Los Angeles is witty, well cast and far ruder than it needs to be, and it has about one season of story stretched over seven. David Duchovny makes the stretching bearable.
Tom Kapinos’s comedy begins with a blocked novelist waking up hungover in Los Angeles and ends, seven seasons and 84 half-hours later, with the same novelist in roughly the same position. Californication is about a man who knows exactly what is wrong with him and does it anyway. For one season that is a good subject and a well-made programme. After that the series discovers that a man who never changes is easy to write, and it keeps writing him long after we have stopped needing to be told.
David Duchovny is the reason to stay as long as you do. Hank Moody is a long way from Fox Mulder: he slouches, he smirks, he delivers every insult as if slightly bored by his own fluency, and he is rude to everyone. He is also able to sit still. The quiet scenes between Hank and his daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin) moved us more than we were ready for, because the jokes around them had taught us he was not capable of that. Duchovny directed episodes himself and plainly knows what the camera wants from him, which is mostly to wait.
The supporting cast is better than the show often deserves. Natascha McElhone plays Karen, the woman Hank cannot stop wanting, with a tired intelligence that makes her the only adult on screen. Evan Handler and Pamela Adlon, as Hank’s agent Charlie Runkle and Charlie’s wife Marcy, run a marriage far filthier than Hank’s sex life and far more honest about it, and most of the best scenes belong to them; Adlon can make one syllable sound like a verdict. Madeline Zima’s Mia Lewis is a nasty, clever creation, a girl who understands Hank better than he does and uses it. Callum Keith Rennie arrives in the second season as the record producer Lew Ashby, the one person Hank seems slightly afraid of.
It looks better than a half-hour sex comedy needs to. Michael Weaver and Andy Graham, two of the series’ cinematographers, keep the light warm and low, Los Angeles at the end of the afternoon, so the city looks like a place a man might reasonably refuse to leave. Peggy Schnitzer puts Hank in a black T-shirt, jeans and boots in the first episode and keeps him there for seven years, which is the most consistent piece of characterisation the show manages. Tyler Bates and Tree Adams supply electric guitar at the tempo of someone who has not got out of bed. The 28-minute episodes are a mercy; nothing stays on screen long enough to wear out inside a single one.
Across a season it is a different matter. The sex is constant and almost never has a consequence. Women arrive, undress, say one line about Hank’s novel and leave, and after a dozen of them this stops being libertine and starts being wallpaper. The 18 certificate is earned, and then re-earned, less interestingly, every week. The show is also soft on Becca in a way it is soft on nobody else, so that each episode of bad behaviour is paid off with a wise speech from a child, and we winced at the speeches more than at anything in the bedrooms.
The larger fault is one the series cannot fix without ending. Hank hurts Karen, Hank apologises, Karen nearly takes him back, Hank does it again. The first season plays this as a small tragedy with jokes. By the fourth we were watching the same scene in a different house, and we had started counting; a comedy you are counting has lost you. Each new season brings a new woman to be the year’s complication and a new address to drink at, and underneath nothing moves.
It is better written than Entourage (2004), with which it shared a city and a decade, and it is a good deal more pleased with itself. Kapinos wants Hank to be a tragedy and a good night out at once, and in seven years he never chooses.
Watch the first season, which is a complete thing: twelve half-hours with a beginning, a middle and an end that could have been the end. Carry on only if you find you miss him. We did, slightly, and we are not proud of it; he is excellent company for a man who never pays for anything.
