Tell Me You Love Me Watch: The Little Things

Posted by James Poniewozik Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 4:31 pm

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HBO photo: Doug Hyun

TV is a medium made for showing the little things--small gestures, facial inflections, tiny shadings of meaning. It's better suited to this than theater because that's what moving pictures make possible: tight closeups, for instance, that eliminate the need for broad gestures and voices that project. And serial TV is better suited to little things than film because it has more time--there's not as much need for broad strokes or getting to the end in two or three hours, meaning that you can learn about characters by seeing how they repeat themselves, but slightly differently.

That's not to say that TV always focuses on little things, or even usually. But fine shading of characters is one of the attributes that make the best serial dramas--even the ones, like The Sopranos, that also have big explosive scenes. If Tell Me You Love Me has a failing, it's that it overestimates even the HBO audience's appetite for the little things. It's nothing but little things. It's a freaking tapas menu. Even The Wire throws you a steak every now and then.

But the second episode of TMYLM shows how well the series does the little things--in particular, every time Tim DeKay or Ally Walker are on screen as sexless marrieds Dave and Katie. Their opening scene--back to school shopping with the kids at some antiseptic megastore--gives you their relationship in miniature, everything that works and doesn't work about it. They push their shopping carts as if they were trudging behind plow horses, they have small squabbles, and yet the scene isn't just about how they're trapped in their routine. It's also about how their routine sustains them. They genuinely seem to love their kids and complement each other. They're a great team--it's just that being a team has superseded their being a marriage.

Shopping, Dave tells Katie, is "like a military operation. You're the captain. We need to get out of here fast, and get out alive." On The King of Queens, say--or Roseanne, where Cynthia Mort was a writer--this would have been a punchline. Here, it's more fraught because it's a defense (seeing each other as partners is a way of denying their having grown apart) and because we know there are stakes. It's the opposite of the comedy cliche: It's not funny, because it's true. What was that Paul Rudd line in Knocked Up--that real marriage is like Everybody Loves Raymond, except that it's not funny and it lasts forever? That's TMYLM.

I can't overstate how good DeKay and Walker are in these roles. I liked Carnivale decently, and almost never watched Profiler, so I had no expectations of them. But DeKay has Dave's repressed, passive-aggressive yet doting husbandry and fatherhood down. Again, it's the little things, like how he takes out a package of bologna to make sandwiches and sniffs it before setting it on the counter. Or the exaggerated little-boyishness in his voice as he calls Katie in her therapist's waiting room, pretending to have forgotten she has an appointment, but clearly dying for reassurance that he shouldn't be terrified. Or his sudden explosions and retrenchments, as when he tells Katie he's not going to buy the car, then, as soon as the dealer walks into the room, capitulates, because nothing would be worse than displaying his problems in front of a stranger.

Walker, meanwhile, is something to watch in her sessions with May, darting in and out of candor like a mouse testing whether it's safe to leave its hole. And the final scene--OK, you're going to think I focused on it because heterosexual guys want to see a hot chick masturbate. But before the show's premiere, when I kept insisting that the sex scenes were more about character revelation than arousal, this is exactly what I meant.

Look at what Walker goes through in this wordless extended scene. She closes her office door. Tentatively walks to the bedroom. Pullls down the shade. Lies on the bed. Over her shoulder--one of the kids' stuffed bears. (Even with the house all to herself, she can never get away from the presence of the kids.) Sits bolt upright, that hyper-wariness kicking in again. No. The bedroom won't work. Too close to the scene of the crime, or lack thereof. The bathroom. She tries to concentrate. Unbuttons one button on her jeans. Her hand slips down her pants, she focuses, tries to force herself to lose control--and then you see something break in her face. She shakes her head, pulls out her hand as if someone had walked in on her. She laughs at herself, bitterly. She feels ridiculous.

She's as alone in her house as she can possibly be, and yet she still can't really be alone.

The other stories, I admit, get less interesting in descending order of age. Jamie and Hugo stop the show dead whenever one of them appears, although the scene of her silently spying on him as he browses in the gas-station convenience store is beautiful. They should have been reconceived, or better yet, replaced: this might have been a good place to write in a gay couple instead, for instance.

Carolyn and Palek fall somewhere in the middle. Palek is a problem; he has problems opening up, for reasons that will become clearer, but where DeKay makes Dave's repression sing, Adam Scott just makes him a cipher. But Sonya Walger really sells Carolyn's need for connection and insecurity, again in little touches, as when she matter of factly prods her jelly roll while waiting for Palek to stop watching football and inseminate her.

The scenes between Carolyn and Palek have an especially voyeuristic, you're-not-meant-to-see-this feel. (It's partly a function of architecture: there they are, in that big modernist house, surrounded by all that plate glass.) And again, their sex scene tells you more about where they are now than they're ready to say out loud yet: Carolyn pumping Palek to get him ready -- the faraway look of disinterest in his eyes, the look of anxiousness in hers. She's in this, and he isn't--and she's starting to realize it, and she needs him to be.

I don't know if I can manage a TMYLM Watch every week--partly because, as I said, this is a show about minutiae much more than plot, and partly because, for that reason, I'm tempted to go on and on dissecting split seconds and brief, wordless scenes. But if you're still with me, and still with TMYLM, let me know what you think. Are you entranced by the little things in this series too? Or is it just plenty of nothing?

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poniewozik Loved the season. Mrs Tuned In wd have put u on the main list RT @boredtodeath Thank u for incl us in Time's Top 10. We'll take hon mention. - 8 hours ago
poniewozik @carr2n Virgin is the best, LAX-JFK - 9 hours ago
poniewozik Did NPR interview abt multiscreen multitasking. After, automatically reached for iPhone in pocket. Like don draper wd have for cigarettes. - 10 hours ago