Please Pass the Porn

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I do like my porn, and it’s The Closer on TNT.

It’s complete and total chick fantasy: we, like the lovely-in-an-actual-
real-human-female-way Kyra Sedgwick, are a woman boss (but not like any of the women bosses anyone’s ever had) and all our employees adore us and would do anything for us, up to and including happily feeding our menagerie of cats when we’re away with our sexy FBI beau.

Seriously, that show is great! (Please pass the lube.)

Most of the non-basic-cable lineup is lifestyle porn in one way or another: I don’t know when the last time was that I watched something on a network, what with Weeds and Entourage and all of Bravo cooing my name.

Oh, Bravo. I fantasize that I could actually cook things. I imagine I could actually wear great clothes. But I’ve given several weeks of my life to your newest exploitation, and I just can’t get behind Flipping Out. In this case, Bravo is getting the porn all wrong.

What perfect timing Bravo had in featuring the work of a high-class house flipper. The market’s a little bit down right now, like glaciers are a little bit melty, and we could all laugh and snurfle at the vultures. (Flippers are not well-loved in bear circles, snatching as they do any possible deals and then driving the market back up.) Except Bravo, in its wisdom, barely shows the houses at all as it focuses instead on Jeff Lewis’s disturbing lip-poof.

I don’t really care if he’s a monster, a self-deluded, vainglorious rooster with multiple assistants who buys $75 massages for each of his pets while noting that his contractors pay their Latino dudes $100 a day.

Sure, it’s fun to note his self-righteousness when demanding his real estate agents take a $5 thousand hit because he will not take a penny less than $2.6 million for one of his hideous properties, and the buyer wants a credit. Why should Jeff Lewis have to pay for it? Why would his real estate agents value $5 thousand over his years of loyalty? He goes on and on and on, never once turning the question back on himself, or noting that their commission can absorb a $5 thousand blow not nearly so well as can his $1.2 million profit (minus the lots of money, of course, that he paid to his Latino dudes). Actually, now that I do the math, the agents baked themselves quite a bit of bread. Maybe everyone should just shut up.

But those are the parts of the show that actually illustrate the business of house flipping. The pet massages don’t. The pet psychics don’t. The multiple assistants biting their tongues and avoiding the cameras and him with deadened eyes because he’s an abusive daddy don’t. His leaving the job site to search for a lost cat—clearly in mortal danger as it’s hiding in a cupboard the whole time—and then demanding that the assistant who “lost” him write a written apology ... doesn’t.

And where are the houses? Jeff Lewis has so many he’s working on, and they all get short shrift on the show. We see quick before and after shots—the afters are always the klassiest shade of beige—but not more than a moment to see what’s really been done. Of course, it doesn’t take a moment to see they’ve invariably ripped out each and every tree.

We want beauty shots—and money shots—of those granite counters (ugh). We want to see just the two tones of taupe he’s painted the living room. We would like more tacky marble, please, the cameras lingering lasciviously.

I don’t care about your god damn pussy.

This isn’t Cinemax, you know.

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