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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
HBO's "Mind of the Married Man" is about as edgy as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Jan 23, 2002 | It would be hard to determine how often the verb "jerk off" crops up in normal conversation among urban heterosexuals, but it can't be as often as it does in the HBO sex sitcom "The Mind of the Married Man," which just concluded its first season. The series, the brainchild of the comedian Mike Binder, is about a Chicago newspaper columnist in his 30s named Mickey Barnes (Binder), whose basically happy marriage to a beautiful English journalist named Donna doesn't prevent him from having stray thoughts about other women. (That's what's going on inside his mind.) In the pilot episode, Donna discovers some porn that Mickey has downloaded onto his laptop, and she flips out. This leads to a lot of wry jokes ("You may as well have cheated!") between Mickey and his two best buddies -- the henpecked, anxious Doug, and the compulsively womanizing Jake -- and, of course, to those many jokes about onanism.
But as you watch the pilot of HBO's latest creation, what strikes you about all the strenuously off-color repartee is just how striking it's intended to be. HBO has struck gold in the past few years with programming that's too raw for networks, and it's clear from the first few minutes of "The Mind of the Married Man" that the new show is going to exploit the freedom from censorship that cable programming offers. That may be what's wrong with it.
The question that the new show really raises isn't about what married guys think about their wives, or sex, or marriage, but whether the freedom to talk dirty is always necessary to creating more authentic television drama -- whether every new HBO series will feel obliged to feature "edgy" and explicit bits, whether they're appropriate or not. "The Mind of the Married Man" may think it's concerned with sex, but what it's really worried about is "Sex and the City."
There are two big problems with the show. The first is that the married man in question isn't so exceptional; despite the jerk-off jokes, the occasional arguments about anal intercourse and the glimpses of simulated fellatio and cunnilingus that it offers, "The Mind of the Married Man" is, at heart, squeaky clean. Mickey is a familiar TV type, a nice, middle-class, almost-middle-aged guy with nice, middle-class, almost-middle-aged problems.
And indeed, as you watch the series you find yourself wondering whether this is a mind you really need to explore. Mickey doesn't feel like changing the baby when he gets home from work. He hangs out with his work buddies at a local bar. He has a crush on his luscious new assistant, Missy (who, in his fantasies, talks dirty to him while he's in bed with his wife, and whom he fires, briefly, in the first episode because he fantasizes about her too much). He's happy that a column he's written riles the mayor. He's protective of Doug, who's the type to lose out on big promotions, and jealous of Jake, who likes to screw new hires in the elevator. He argues with Donna about whether their sex life is spicy enough. ("We should have anal sex right now," the beleaguered Donna snaps back. "Because I've got to do the dishes and put the baby to bed.") His friends are more sketchily drawn, but they're not all that different in their horny middle-class ambivalence: Doug likes his wife, Carol, to dress in sexy lingerie, but then worries about the bills and makes her change into something more sensible.
