TV Review: 'Tell Me You Love Me'

By Rick Porter, Zap2It.com | September 8, 2007

Tim DeKay and Ally Walker of 'Tell Me You Love Me'

HBO's new series has lots of sex, but it's not about that

We'll get to the sex in a minute. But if you're watching "Tell Me You Love Me" for the sex, you're not watching the right show.

HBO's newest drama series, premiering at 9 p.m. ET Sunday, is an unflinching look at the intimacy, and sometimes the lack of it, between three couples at varying points in their lives. It is very well-acted -- Ally Walker and Tim DeKay, playing a married couple with kids, especially stand out -- and often sharply written.

It's also, at times, really difficult viewing -- akin to being out with a group of people and having two of them fight in front of you. There are rewards to be had from watching "Tell Me You Love Me," and it gets better as it progresses, but it's not a show that's going to make you feel happy.

And, yes, there's sex, and quite a bit of it (though significantly more in Sunday's premiere than in any of the three subsequent episodes I screened). It's about as explicit as anything you've ever seen in a serious-minded TV show: angry sex, furtive sex, obligated sex, procreative sex. Very little of it, though, can be described as sexy. Instead, the sex scenes offer a window into just how deep these people's issues go.

Pretty darn deep, it turns out: Katie (Walker, "Profiler") and David (DeKay, "Carnivale") have been married for 12 years and have two good kids and a fairly comfortable, if hectic, life -- and haven't had sex in a year. Carolyn (Sonya Walger, "Lost") and Palek (Adam Scott, "The Aviator") are trying to conceive their first child, and the act has become more chore than pleasure. The youngest of the three couples, Jamie (Michelle Borth) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby) are about to get married, but she has some pretty serious trust issues.

The three couples share a few tenuous connections -- David and Palek cross paths in the course of their jobs, Jamie is friends with Carolyn's sister (Kate Towne) -- and they all end up seeing the same therapist, Dr. May Foster (multiple Oscar nominee Jane Alexander). She comes across as a good therapist and an empathetic listener, and also has a fairly healthy, long-lasting (and still sexually active) marriage.

She's no miracle worker, however, and so her patients don't make much significant progress. It's here that "Tell Me You Love Me" can be at its best and simultaneously its most unsettling (coupled with "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which also begins its season Sunday, HBO may have created the squirmiest night of television ever). We're witness to every uncomfortable silence, averted gaze and clipped conversation, documented with hand-held cameras that only add to the voyeuristic feel of things.

David and Katie come off as the most sympathetic as a couple who clearly still love one another but lost something along the way and have no idea where to look for it. Both Walker and DeKay have a number of quietly powerful moments early on; DeKay eventually boils over in episode four, and it's riveting.

Borth's Jamie is harder to like, a bundle of neuroses who dumps her fiancee and then immediately regrets it and tries to take it back. (It doesn't help that the people she surrounds herself with are uniformly unlikeable.) Palek and Carolyn aren't bundles of joy either -- so fixated are they on trying to get pregnant that they hardly seem to realize they're circling the drain.

Creator Cynthia Mort never shies away from showing us those things, and she won't let us shy away from it either. That's an admirable thing, but it doesn't make watching "Tell Me You Love Me" any easier.