TV Review: The Client List (NSFW)

This is going to be a short review of a show from 2010 that I watched three episodes of. I would normally not review something that I watched so little of, and let it fade away like so many other shows that either aren’t good or aren’t for me, but this one is somehow sticking with me, even though I have absolutely no desire to watch any more of it. It’s very possible that it changes in later episodes, but I’m not giving it the chance.

The Client List is about a woman who works at a massage parlor and gives happy endings. It was on Lifetime, which probably explains all the things that I find weird about it. It stars Jennifer Love Hewitt, and is based on a TV movie of the same name, which I haven’t watched, but is apparently “super depressing”. I read the Wikipedia summary, and it sounds much more like what I would consider to be within the realm of the storytelling beats I’d expect from a show about this sort of thing (there, it’s a downward spiral plot as part of a morality play).

This review will discuss some of the directorial and editorial choices, along with discussion of sex work and narrative considerations. There aren’t any pictures or anything.

Happy Endingz

There was a LiveJournal blog I used to follow, “Happy Endingz: Confessions of an Erotic Masseuse” (NSFW), which is where I get most of my knowledge of what it’s like to be that particular variety of sex worker. I think if you’re trying to research this sort of thing, or you just want authenticity, you have to be careful, because a lot of what people will write about any kind of sex-related subject will be fiction written because they’re horny. The veneer of authenticity is important to some people, so they’ll lie and say ‘oh, I know this sounds like a Penthouse letter, but it’s really real, I swear’, and then give the most incredibly unrealistic description of a sequence of events that never once happened in human history.

The Happy Endingz blog is not that, which is why I trust it. I haven’t read it in probably ten years, and it seems as though it’s been defunct for nearly that long, but it’s a decidedly unerotic description of being an erotic masseuse. Most of the time, CJ is bitching about her coworkers not showing up to their shifts, her clients being smelly or gross or weird or rude, and the problems in her dating life. Most of these transpose very well onto any other job in the service industry.

Of the ones that don’t have good equivalents to working as a hairdresser, there are concerns about police raids, violence from customers, customers trying to push her to ‘full service’, having to hide what she does from friends and family, and some of the peculiarities of the practical side of things.

If I were writing The Client List as a ten episode drama, I would focus on the tensions in the lead character. She’s not engaging in sex work because of a love of sex work, she’s doing it because it’s a way to keep a roof over her children’s head. She’s a Christian woman and thinks that it’s sinful, and has to grapple with what it means to her, if anything. She has to hide what she’s doing from everyone in her life. There’s constant pressure to take the next step and cross another line. There are threats of various kinds from clients: threats of violence and threats to out her. Maybe some of them fall in love or come to depend on her for emotional support, which is less dangerous but still a prickly situation. It’s a fraught thing, and there are lots of directions to take it.

In its opening episodes, The Client List goes in a decidedly different direction.

The Elephant in the Room

The Client List does not ever show a handjob, at least in the three episodes I watched, but I really doubt that changes later on. Now you might be thinking “of course not, this aired on Lifetime”, but I don’t mean “they never show Jennifer Love Hewitt giving a simulated handjob on a prosthetic”. I mean that whenever it would come time for her to do the actual sex work part of the job, they cut away.

I personally think that the point of a sex scene, any sex scene, is to show the characters in some way, and my general rule is that unless you’re aiming for titillation, the point is to be true to the characters and have things be shown and not told. If it’s just a “normal” sex scene, then I don’t think it’s needed most of the time; the reader should understand what it feels like to have sex, and if they don’t know, I don’t think that reading it is going to get it across. Where I feel it’s necessary, or at least appropriate, is when the sex scene changes the relationship between the characters in some way, and even then, you can leave it off most of the time and fade to black without losing all that much.

So in the first episode of The Client List, our protagonist is down on her luck, badly in need of money, and has finally resolved to give handjobs for money. Her first client is a hunk (more on that later) and she comes out in a skimpy outfit that he bought for her, and they flirt for a bit while she gives him the normal part of the massage, and when it comes time to do the other thing … we cut to her in the locker room, counting her money.

I have all kinds of problems with this. The biggest is that I don’t actually know what was going on in her head. This is the monumental thing that the whole pilot episode has been building up to, it’s crossing the Rubicon, it’s the point, and I’m left trying to parse a single expression on Jennifer Love Hewitt’s face. It doesn’t look like regret or grim determination, it’s just a slight smile that I can only interpret as ‘hey, maybe this isn’t so bad’. And yeah, so much of what’s happening is internal to the character, and it would be hard to show any of it, but …

Alright, let’s say that I was in charge of writing or directing this scene, or any of the other scenes like it. I would focus on eyelines and blocking. I would want the viewer to be watching the actress’ face, because the scene is fundamentally about her. If necessary, I would intercut with whatever it is she’s thinking about, and if really necessary I would add voiceover, though I think both of those are crutches, and the latter is worse than the former. I would want, as much as possible in a visual medium, to get inside the character’s head. This is the first man she’s sexually touched since getting married, and since she’s a Good Christian Woman (more on this later) it’s very possible that she’s sexually inexperienced.

I have to imagine that giving a handjob for money for the first time is a very awkward thing for any number of reasons, so I would personally put some of that awkwardness in there, but that’s a very “character” based decision. Maybe she’s watching the man’s face, maybe she’s staring off into the distance, maybe she’s closing her eyes … but all those things would tell us something different about her character and how she feels about this thing she’s doing.

When she’s finished, does she feel awkward, ashamed, embarrassed? I don’t need a scene where Jennifer Love Hewitt is wiping spunk off her hand, but the way in which that kind of scene is acted would tell me so much about what she thinks of any of this. Maybe it’s clinical, washing her hands like she’s washing the dishes. Maybe it’s dissociated, like she’s watching someone wash her hands from a remove. Maybe there’s a slight upward curl of her lip. I don’t know, I would probably include something like that, if there weren’t problems with the censors or the advertisers or whatever the hell else you have to think about when you’re making a television show that’s going to air on Lifetime. (To be clear, I would block the scene so it’s only showing her face, since that’s the important part, leaving everything out of frame to implication. If she’s at a sink or wiping her hands on a towel or whatever, this is off camera, which is more effective anyway.)

So instead of using the camera and the actors to interrogate any of that, we cut away. This is how it is for basically every time this show has an implied handjob. I kind of get it from a business standpoint, at least with what I know about how these shows get made and who they’re made for, I just think it’s terrible as a piece of art.

Coming to Grips

In the first three episodes, the show sort of settles into a rhythm, which is to have a single client as a monster of the week type thing, mixed with a bunch of home life shit that I don’t care about and which doesn’t really involve any of the sex work stuff. There’s an ongoing mystery about just what her wayward husband’s deal is, what seems to be some romantic tension with her husband’s brother, and a whole cast of characters that I don’t care about. A lot of this comes off as “ah shit, we have 44 minutes to fill, let’s get a larger cast with their own subplots”.

The way the show treats the clients is interesting. They’re very often hunks, and at least in those early episodes, very sympathetic. One guy had a bad relationship that burned him and just needs love and affection, another guy has been having trouble with his wife that the protagonist helps to mend, and so on. I would assume that there’s one of these a week, but I’m not going to watch more of this show to check.

It’s treated as a revelation that the main character is talking to these men and playing therapist, as though that’s not a large amount of what sex workers end up doing. Everything that I’ve read about sex work says that it’s only partly about sex, and a lot of men who hire sex workers are looking for social and emotional connection, if not a therapist. In fact, The Client List is at least partly based on a real case, in classic Lifetime fashion; a massage parlor in Texas was raided and sixtysome people were arrested for prostitution. If you go looking for those news articles, you’ll see a lot of testimonials that there were men who mostly wanted love and affection, physical affirmation, things like that.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but one of the big social differences between men and women is that women get a ton of compliments, many of them “compliments” and very unwanted, while men hardly ever have anyone remark on their appearance in any way, and get starved for it. Men will remember a compliment from ten years ago because it’s so rare and so wonderful to get one. I think paying someone to pay you a compliment is kind of sad, but I get it. Sometimes, sex workers end up being like therapists for their clients, except they aren’t trained in therapy and can do things that therapists can’t do, like tell you that you’re sexy.

(I also think that ‘these are just lonely men who need affection and affirmation’ is a much more palatable story for most people, the kind of story you would want to tell a judge or jury in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence, or otherwise justifying something that people are deeming immoral. I have my own complicated and nuanced feelings on sex work, but think it’s a little bit untrue to just set all the ‘base pleasure-seeking’ aspects to the side.)

It really does seem like The Client List is doing everything in its power to make the protagonist and her work sympathetic to the viewer, like they were afraid that people would change the channel. It probably goes without saying given how long this review is, but this just doesn’t work for me, because it makes it all feel very hollow. I’m way outside the target audience, which I think is Southern housewives.

Bad Media

If I do end up watching more of it, I’ll update this review, but hopefully this exorcises the demons from my mind. I was going to watch the movie version, which is apparently very different in tone, but it’s a niche Lifetime movie and is like $12 to rent on streaming services, and I just don’t care that much.

From reading the Wikipedia summaries of the remaining episodes, it does seem that they bring in the police as a plot element, which … I really wonder how they handle given how toothless and noncommittal everything in the first three episodes is. But no, there’s only so much I can watch things that I’m watching for the sake of learning something about mass media and how it’s made.