Ann and I have now watched five episodes of the new Showtime series Californication, and while I can say it seems to have settled down into a comfortable rhythm, it still mostly comes across as a male writer’s wet dream. David Duchovny is a passable, sometimes enjoyable-to-watch, down-and-out writer in LA who gets a job writing a nihilistic blog column while watching his ex-wife prepare to get married to someone else, going through a succession of one-night stands (always with him on the bottom so we can get a good flash of breasts), and drinking too much…and not writing much at all.

The problem isn’t that Duchovny’s character is too down-and-out. It’s that he’s not down-and-out enough. He’s just far enough down that he’s functional and able to screw a lot. But he’s not tragically laid low, in the Greek sense. Nor do we get enough of a sense of him ever having been a decent human citizen. This guy seems to always have been an asshole.

So you’re left with a plotless, drifting relationship-driven half-hour in which Duchovny’s debaucheries have to act as the high points in terms of interest. This might play well with a certain type of Hollywood writer, who mistakes this kind of cynical, world-weary life for maturity or some kind of skid-row wisdom, but for me it just played like the worst kind of knee-jerk sexism. Duchovny’s character doesn’t give a shit about women, not even his ex-wife. He doesn’t give a shit about anything.

At a glance, Californication looks like a throw-back to some 1970s exploration of sex and love. But if you look any closer than the surface, you realize just how empty and self-serving this series really is. The writer’s revenge here is that Duchovny gets to live what is a dream-life in many men’s heads: no responsibility and lots of sex. A dream-life that as made “reality” in this series has no repercussions and no weight. Not really.