Shahi is far better than the material she has been given, though the rest of the cast seem to have accepted their cardboard-cutout fate, and I suspect it isn’t meant to be half as funny as it often is. I do appreciate that looking for authentic dialogue here is like turning up at Centre Court and demanding to see a decent football match. As did I: nobody should have to hear the line “Get your fuck on” without plenty of warning.
Later, having exhausted the idea that being young and responsibility-free seems more appealing than looking after two children, it reaches for an orgy as the solution to their marital problems, and suddenly gets rather prudish. But Carrie Bradshaw would never let this prose near her laptop: “The stability and sanity he offered was a soothing balm to my spent, scorched soul,” Billie writes of reliable Cooper, at which point I called the alliteration police and reported an assault on consonants. There are attempts to bring a bit of Sex & the City spirit into this silly saga Billie even has a meltdown over cupcakes in Manhattan. He’s a tortured soul, you see, and he just needs the love of a good woman to stop him acting like a thundering arsehole. But, rather than the intensity of their conversations, we see the intensity of their neon-lit sex in pools, neon-lit sex in corridors, and occasionally, just in bed, in soft light, staring into each other’s eyes. Yet “the intensity of our conversations was intoxicating”, she swoons. Brad is a bad boy, which means he treats Billie terribly and is prone to passive-aggressive tantrums whenever she’s nice to him. That this dilemma is strung out over eight long episodes is almost impressive, given how sparse the story is. The episodes cut between her two lives: wild with Brad, solid with Cooper. Soon, it starts to make him jealous and insecure. At first, it injects a bit of spark into their marriage.
Billie writes her memories of their tempestuous relationship into a sex diary, which she leaves open on her laptop for Cooper to see. Brad, more hairstyle than character, treats her mean to keep her keen, enjoys the music of Miles Davis, hates his father, and has a big penis. Do you see?īillie starts to dream about her former life, and hot and heavy trysts with her ex-boyfriend, Brad, who is a walking leather jacket – a record company executive with all the charm of a record company executive. “She can’t breathe in there and she’s gonna die if you don’t let her out,” says Billie. In case the conflict wasn’t clear, the first episode has Billie’s son holding up a butterfly he has trapped in a jar. Now, she struggles to keep her husband’s attention, even when she’s naked and on top of him. In her 20s, while studying for a PhD in psychology, Billie “ho-ed her way through half of Manhattan”, as she puts it.
Every interior, from penthouse to mansion to restaurant to “small” apartment, looks like the lobby of an upmarket hotel every hairstyle is coiffured and sprayed solid to within an inch of its follicles.īillie realises she is unsatisfied with her glossy life, particularly the sexual side of it, which has become routine.
Cooper has the sort of vague TV business job that means he goes to meetings, seems tired and wears a suit. Sarah Shahi is Billie Connelly (and if this doesn’t make you consider an alternative version with a dishevelled Scottish comedian as the lead, you are a better person than me), a thirtysomething woman with two small children, who lives in a big house in the suburbs with her Ken-doll husband, Cooper. Call me suspicious, but after sitting through eight episodes of shagging strung together with the occasional splash of melodrama, I don’t think it’s the dialogue that has people streaming it in their droves. T o paraphrase the ever relevant Mrs Merton: what first attracted viewers to the sex-strewn, nudity-heavy saucefest Sex/Life (Netflix)? The show, an adaptation of BB Easton’s novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men, shot to the top of Netflix’s Top 10 when it was released last week.