voxpoptart's Full Review: Coupling - The Complete First Season
Apparently season two of the British television show Coupling is going to be shown in America on PBS. I'm afraid my first reaction wasn't positive. Mind you, it will be the best PBS show going for the over-12 crowed: a welcome break from political talkfests devoted to the corporate bounties of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, and much funnier than Masterpiece Theater. But it's the concept, you know: "Oh, yes! We need the government to fund a sitcom about sex. No way the market is going to support that".
But the DVD of Coupling's entire season one (all six half-hour episodes) is hardly a best-seller, and maybe that makes sense. ABC, CBS, and NBC are just stodgy enough not to want to admit that sexual folkways are, all by themselves, enough to support a show. Fox would be puzzled at the notion that entendres should be double. The WB and UPN are for people who think the notion that 30-year-olds still haven't given up sex yet is icky. And so, like the talk-show host Graham Norton, Coupling may fall into the category of British product that is gutter-minded, completely unelevating, sometimes squeamish, and much too good for America at large. But it's available on American DVD, so: what is it, exactly?
Well. It's got three male friends and three female friends, all good-looking and 30-ish, any male/female pair of which either has slept together at some point in the past or might at some point in the show's indefinite future. A brand new sitcom concept, I realize.
Jeff is the curly-haired geek who is a sputtering, fearful failure at dating, but invents useful new words and concepts to _analyze_ dating in the perpetual belief that everyone will immediately understand them ("Ah! But you're still in the Boyfriend Zone", or "You've been struck by the Giggle-Loop"). He thinks a lot about sex and porn and Helen Millett (who is apparently the British equivalent of Nastassja Kinski or Sharon Stone, a guaranteed mark that This Movie Will Have Nudity). Steve is an intendedly dignified romantic who begins dating one of the female cast in the first episode and continues through the last; he thinks a lot about sex and porn and Helen Millett. Patrick is a relative lunk-head and a Tory who thinks a lot about sex and porn and Helen Millett. His third idea for a good title for a porn movie about a woman whose breasts each have independent brains hidden in them is The Woman With Two Brains; "Don't you mean three brains?", Steve asks; "Ooh, forgot about that one". But apparently Patrick has other assets in the dating field. (Sally refers to him as "Old Donkey-Brains"; Patrick's ex Susan says "I didn't call him Donkey-Brains, I called him Donkey". Sally says "Yes, but I figured out what you meant". Susan, after a hesitation and blush: "....No, you didn't".)
Susan, Steve's date for the season, is a kindly sort who thinks about sex and romance and what exactly the plot of Steve's VCR tape of Lesbian Spank Inferno is. Sally uses massive amounts of wrinkle-cream and thinks about sex and romance and whether dating a lunk-headed Tory might be acceptable under certain limited circumstances. Jane is flat-out insane -- not the innocuous kind of insane that will get her belting out choruses of "Smelly Cat", but the kind of insane that makes her think it's perfectly sensible for her to try to sleep with gay men, since she's part-gay herself.
The real problem though, for American mass audience, is that the show is _not_ just about sex, even if topics from vibrators to penis size to fear-impotency get covered. The show is also about the power of silence as a motive to say foolish things, and about the power of extended metaphors. Steve's "I love you"s to Susan occur as conversational stopgaps: "Give a man one awkward second, it'll be 'Are you okay?', two seconds gets you 'Are you having your period', by three or more it's 'I love you'". But much worse is when an entire idea is hanging out there, as the speaker fratically starts pondering the implications while the listener refuses to react in clear fashion. Jeff's episode five monologue, to a sexy book-reading girl who's smiled at him in a bar, is worth reprinting because it's typical; there's several others just as good that I won't mention:
"Ah! You can read... I mean, you _are_ reading. Sorry. It's nice to see people reading. Not a lot of people read these days. People prefer to... hear. But all this 'hearing' is reading for lazy people. Kids should be prepared to pick up a book, and not just go around all the time with these modern... ears. Sometimes I just wanna rip people's ears off and say 'Read a book, for God's sake!'... Well, actually I'd probably say 'Read a book' and _then_ rip their ears off, otherwise they wouldn't hear me, hehhehhehheh... Actually, I probably wouldn't rip their ears off at all, I'm not a violent person. I like ears! Especially women's ears, they're my favorite. I don't mean I collect ears! I don't have like a bucket of ears hidden away somewhere. No, I'm not some kind of ear collector. Not that there's anything wrong with your ears! You have very nice ears! If I was some kind of {mad giggle} ear person, yours would be the pride of my collection".
*******
Jeff gets away with this monologue -- find out for yourself why -- but what's striking here is the commitment to an idea. Coupling's characters are constantly thinking about what they're saying, as well as the implications of what happens. If they thought about them with any reliable skill, they'd be different people, and it would be a different show. Instead we have something more like Very Bright Men Behaving Badly (Not On Purpose, Of Course). The women aren't any less obsessed, which is a nice break from stereotype. And if we learn anything useful while we watch, well! That's a nice bonus too.
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