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 Only the best clients will do for Foxtel’s new drama.
It’s no secret that most of the best small screen dramas these days appear on Pay-TV, whether it’s HBO (The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Oz, Sex and the City), Showtime (Dexter, Weeds, Californication) or the locally made Love My Way on Foxtel.
Unfortunately, with our best productions hidden on top tier packaging, it seems you can only see the good stuff if you pay the big bucks. Such is the case with Satisfaction, another handsomely-shot drama delivered as part of pay TV’s requirement to meet local content quotas.
Set in a high-class Melbourne brothel, Satisfaction peels back the lingerie, literally and metaphorically, of its leading ladies. How do personalities alter with nakedness? Do we lie to achieve intimacy or reveal our true selves?
With a vicious and delicious cast including Diana Glenn, Madeleine West, Peta Sergeant and Alison Whyte, these girls certainly live the high life. Forget about life on the street; they’re more concerned about which pair of heels goes with which little black dress.
The result melds the feminine smarts of Sex and the City with Californication’s brazen sexuality. Full frontal nudity, mostly female, and celebrated debauchery pours off the screen. Were this on free to air TV, religious groups would be spamming their databases in righteous fury.
This week’s amusingly titled story, ‘Jizz’, features Heather (Peta Sergant) as a lesbian sex-worker performing heterosexual tricks. She acts out fantasies for a businessman (Nicholas Bell) who loves to don nappies and gurgle like a baby. All part of a day’s work at the office, really. Meanwhile her partner Ally is trying to have a baby, but negotiation with a potential sperm donor is wracked with pitfalls.
Sergant, like the rest of the principal cast, is excellent in a role that has considerably more character shading than those in commercial soaps.
Sympathetic, glossy characters abound in Satisfaction, which consciously skews toward the high end of prostitution with ample success. These ladies could be your neighbour, or the mum you see at school each day picking up the kids in the 4WD. We’ve certainly come a long way from the grim-faced prostitutes in Prisoner!
The design and cinematography are equally sumptuous. Satisfaction is like sipping on the best champagne as you dip your toes into a warm bath; but like the clients of the program’s leading ladies, you’ll need to be a high-class customer of Foxtel to slip off your shoes first, an irony some programmers may have missed.
Satisfaction airs 8:30pm Wednesdays on Showcase.
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