HBO Panel Ducks Questions About Sex

By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, July 14, 2007

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

Having survived PBS's "Nature" duck and sage-grouse sex talk early in Summer TV Press Tour 2007, critics were more than up to tackling HBO's new people-sex series.

"Tell Me You Love Me" or, as critics are calling it here, "That HBO Porn Show," looks at the personal and sexual lives of four committed couples -- one each in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 60s.

And all white.

Jane Alexander plays half of one of the couples; she's also the other couples' therapist and, yes, the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts has lots of happy screen-sex in the series. She's a role model in every way.

At a Q&A session, series creator and exec producer Cynthia Mort insisted she's been surprised by the amount of attention the show's sex -- lots and lots of sex -- is getting. She spoke dismissively of shows that cut away to a lamp when a couple begins to get intimate. Mort doesn't do lamps.

What Mort does do is slump in her chair and look dismissively at TV critics who are anxious to ask her questions about the sex in her show about sex.

"Were you being disingenuous?" one critic asks in re her comment about being surprised at the tittering critics were doing over the graphic sex scenes.

"I'm rarely disingenuous," Mort says, raising her left eyebrow an eighth of an inch. "I am surprised. . . . The sex always was there in service of intimacy and in service of love. So that people are pulling it out -- I understand, but I am somewhat surprised."

"Could I get a set visit?" asks a critic, cutting to the chase. Mort raises her right eyebrow an eighth of an inch.

Critic: Question . . . for the actors. Did anybody actually do it?

Mort: Next question.

Critic: I'm assuming it was fake, but how did you go about making it look so authentic, and why did you have to do that?

Actress Michelle Borth: The sex scenes in any of the episodes are a pretty integral part of the story line. We are not porn stars. We're actors.

("We are not porn stars" -- we think that's a Press Tour first.)

Critic: Question for the producers: I'm not even sure how to word this and believe me, people for the last two days have been trying to figure out a way. Is there anywhere in this that there's, I don't know, CGI, prosthetic? . . . Could Jane Alexander be holding something that is not David Selby[the actor who plays her husband] at a certain point?

Exec producer Gavin Polone: I'm not sure and I don't think you need to get into it.

The critics are now pretty much done with Polone.

Similarly, after a critic tells actor Tim DeKay his character is the most intriguing because he clearly loves his wife but is unwilling to have sex with her, and then asks, "What is the problem?," DeKay goes all tongue-tied.

"Wow, these personal questions -- they go zing!" he says.

This strikes critics as odd, not thinking of him as a shrinking violet after watching his tour de force masturbation performance in the opening scene of the first episode.

Polone jumps back in, uninvited, asking DeKay if he has sex with his real-life wife.

"I do have sex with my wife," DeKay answers, increasingly flustered. Turning to the critics, Polone says, "I feel like you're asking Tim about Tim and [his actual wife] Lisa, which is not what you're asking at all."

"Do you understand your character?" the critic asks, trying to make the distinction.

"Do I understand my character? Yeah, I do understand my character," DeKay says, adding that he will "have to defer to Cynthia [Mort] on this one, because I understand my character, but I think it's more of a writing question."

* * *

TV critics, haunted by What Happened at the End of "The Sopranos" nightmares, got no satisfaction from HBO execs during their suit Q&A. And they were too respectful -- or timid, depending on your perspective -- to ask James Gandolfini about it when he appeared onstage to plug his upcoming documentary about soldiers who returned from Iraq terribly wounded physically and emotionally.

But they seemed finally to get closure from Steven Van Zandt, a.k.a. Silvio Dante on the pay-cable hit, when he came to the tour to promote VH1 Classic's "Seven Ages of Rock."

"Right from the beginning ['Sopranos' creator] David Chase broke every rule in the book and everybody loved him for it," the founding member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band said.

"Literally, he just refused all along to sort of compromise and play that sort of Hollywood-imposed game of fraudulent closure. . . . He's like, 'Life doesn't work that way, it doesn't get wrapped up every 30 minutes or every 60 minutes, and we're not going to play that game.' He's just like, 'This is my last show. . . . I'm going out without compromising.' . . . I thought it was a brilliant ending, myself."

* * *

Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders took time out from their busy schedule of cheering up patients in hospitals, cheering up soldiers in Iraq, cheering up Dallas Cowboys fans and shooting "Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team," a CMT reality series tracking cheerleader tryouts, to bring a little joy into the lives of the TV critics.

The cheerleaders wiggled and jiggled, grinned, kicked and waved pompoms, then bounced offstage. Two den mothers -- a.k.a. cheerleader group director Kelli Finglass and head choreographer Judy Trammell -- came out, joined by one of the cheerleaders and two cheerleader wannabes who were part of the reality series.

Kelli and Judy were Cowboys cheerleaders in the '80s. Their hair is still in the '80s. Kelli and Judy remind us that attractive people spend too much time in the sun -- the only advantage unattractive people have over attractive people.

During the Q&A, a TV critic from Dallas noted the press material used phrases such as "sacred try-outs" and "sacred blue-and-white uniform," which, he said, "seems to be a bit much."

"Anyone that's worn the blue-and-white uniform -- it is sacred," Judy said.

"Kelli and I both started as cheerleaders. I was a cheerleader from '80 to '84, and so we just really protect it. We do not want anyone to ruin our image in any way."

" 'Sacred' to some might seem dramatic," added Kelli. "It is a part of the excitement of the National Football League, and for that, for the people that have worn it, yes, we would say it's sacred."