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`Sexual Healing,' premiering Friday on Showtime |
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Written by KRT
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Friday, 21 July 2006 |
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SEXUAL HEALING
10 p.m. EDT Friday
Showtime
You don't have to be a Bible thumper to believe, fervently, that "Sexual Healing" signals the beginning of End Times. No one who watches this mishmash of psychobabble cliche and self-indulgent exhibitionism masquerading as marital therapy will ever have sex again.
Angry mobs will race through the streets, clubbing pornographers and lingerie salesmen; Ann Landers and Dear Abby will be burned as witches; Jennifer Love Hewitt will be forced to put on underwear. As humanity fades away, the Earth will belong to cockroaches and other species not eligible to subscribe to Showtime.
Hosted by TV sex doctor Laura Berman and shot by the same video voyeurs who make HBO's "Taxicab Confessions," each episode of "Sexual Healing" features couples who come to Berman's therapy center in Chicago to pick the scabs off their relationships in front of the cameras. It's like watching an episode of "Oprah" where half the guests have been dosed with Spanish fly and the other half locked in steel chastity belts.
By day, the couples flaunt the torments of pop psychology and even invent some new ones: I was molested as a child! My mommy was a whore! You have bad breath from your gastric bypass surgery! I want to be raped on the kitchen table by your boss and forced to make him a sandwich afterward! These examples, alas, are not the products of my overdeveloped capacity for vitriol.
Things do not improve when the sun goes down. The couples do "homework" assigned by Berman, ranging from beginning burlesque lessons to visits to sex supermarkets, with infrared cameras standing by in their rooms in case of a breakthrough. Not likely; most of these people take the "homework" metaphor to heart, turning Berman's attempts at mild titillation into drudgery and travail. One woman even shouts at her recalcitrant (and, no doubt, soon-to-be-ex-) husband, "I'm telling!"
As one of her patients groans to Berman, "I feel there's something wrong with me. Why can't I be normal?" No kidding.
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