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The sex on HBO's Tell Me You Love Me just gets more depressingly realistic with each episode: fruitless attempts at procreation, unsuccessful attempts to fuck away a broken heart with an old booty call, a still-sexless marriage bed...it feels kind of like when a work colleague you don't know too well overshares something really sad and way too personal and you're left shifting in your cubicle wishing you could just talk about Dilbert cartoons instead. It's (almost) enough to make us long for some good-old glamorized Hollywood movie sex. Instead, we're finding respite in Showtime's Californication, which is just as dirty, just as dark, but so very L.A. that it doesn't hit home in the same shoot-me-now kind of way.

It's occasionally completely ridiculous (like when David Duchovny's Hank Moody gets laid in the front seat of a brand new Porsche during a test drive...puh-lease) but more often than not, totally right on. Like when Evan Handler, inspired by his Suicide Girls secretary, tries to get kinky with his wife and things decline from painfully awkward to just plain painful (when a nipple clamp mishap sends him to the ER). There's revenge sex, mourning sex, accidental underage sex, drunk sex, anonymous sex, spanking sex, face-slapping sex, stoned sex, coke sex, dom-sub sex, cheating sex...in fact, pretty much everything except married sex. It's not real life, and it's not HBO either, but if you need a break from either, this show is kind of like the booty call of adults-only TV: funny, hot, fleeting, and unchallenging.