Piper (Doctor Who) works hard for the money. / SHOWTIME
In this week’s Time, I review Showtime’s high-priced escort comedy (the escort is high-priced, though I guess Showtime isn’t cheap either), Secret Diary of a Call Girl, about a London hooker (Billie Piper) whose real name is Hannah but whose trade name is “Belle.” Showtime has marketed it as a fun, glitzy Sex and the City for the post-Spitzer era, but not unlike a Bravo reality show (Work Out, etc.) it’s really most interesting as a show about making a living in the upscale service industries:
Posh as it is, Call Girl at its best is not really a sexy show. There’s something studied and businesslike about Belle’s bed play, and her sessions with pasty-buttocked businessmen are usually more funny than arousing. It’s not a profound show either, though Hannah occasionally ruminates on her sex-vs.-love life à la Carrie Bradshaw in SATC: “Sex is really a numbers game. Group sex is complicated, but that’s mechanics. For me the hardest numbers have always been one plus one.” (One is the loneliest but by no means the highest number that she’ll ever do.)
No, Call Girl is most fascinating simply as a story about work. In TV comedies, the nuts-and-bolts details of jobs tend to fade into the background. In Call Girl, you learn that prostitution at Belle’s level comes with the same demands and annoyances as any other career catering to the high-maintenance wealthy. The show is, in a way, not about sex but about making it (so to speak) in the service economy.
Thus we learn that, like a chef or a spa owner, she has to deal with bad reviews (on a website for sex connoisseurs). Her friends tend to be other service pros: bar managers, boutique clerks, concierges. She earns £105,000 (more than $200,000) a year, pays 40% to a snooty female “agent” and exchanges, ahem, services with her tax preparer. (She writes him a check and he gives her cash back, so that she can get a receipt and write off the tax-prep fee.)
Call Girl debuts on Monday, along with the fourth season of Weeds, which is worth catching for Albert Brooks’ new supporting role as suburban pot dealer Nancy Botwin’s resentful father-in-law. Do you prefer sex or drugs?