Showtime comedy starts 3rd season
BY FRAZIER MOORE
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Published: October 3, 2009
NEW YORK — Hank Moody, the hero of Showtime’s comedy "Californication,” is a roguish struggling novelist who says whatever is on his mind and feels a tug from every member of the opposite sex.
He might get into less trouble if he kept his lip buttoned and his fly zipped. But that wouldn’t be Hank, nor would it be "Californication,” which mines laughs (and, occasionally, gasps) from Hank’s erotic misadventures, and those of his sexed-up fellow travelers.
Starring
David Duchovny, "Californication” has started its third season at 9 p.m. Sunday with Hank landing a much-needed teaching job at a local college. This is thanks to a professor who is the sexy mother of a friend of Hank’s teenage daughter Becca (
Madeleine Martin). Here in academia, Hank is primed to seduce his new colleague (whose husband, the dean of the college, is his boss), while a graduate assistant and a sassy coed are also on Hank’s radar.
"I call it adult comedy,” says Duchovny, "but not in the Triple-X sense. It’s adult comedy because the characters are acting foolish but not acting like children.”
Duchovny, 49, clad smart but unstarlike in a sweater and cords, is meeting a reporter at a luncheonette on the
Upper East Side, where he lives with actress
Tea Leoni, his wife of a dozen years, and their two children.
"Things are great,” he sums up, sharing details from a cross-country RV trip his family made this summer after shooting wrapped on "Californication.” Highlights:
Grand Canyon, a ball game in
St. Louis and a visit with an Amish family in Ohio.
But a year ago, things weren’t so bright. In August 2008, Duchovny announced he was entering rehab for sex addiction. Meanwhile, his marriage was in jeopardy.
Making things worse, this news, for some viewers, served to undermine Duchovny’s accomplishments on "Californication.” It suggested that his role as Hank hit too close to home, that Duchovny wasn’t play-acting as much as just playing himself.
With no sign of defensiveness, Duchovny makes clear he regards the challenges he faced last year to be a private matter.
Any public confusion that arose between Hank’s exploits and the issues for which Duchovny sought help "hurts on both levels,” he says. "It belittles the life and it belittles the work, at the same time.”
"As a father and a husband, I would have preferred not to have exposed (my family) to any of that kind of thing. To me, that’s what’s most regrettable.”
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