If you haven’t yet watched Showtime’s hit series Californication, here’s a quick tagline: Down-and-out novelist Hank Moody – played by David Duchovny – tries to get his life back on track after his partner/muse leaves him and he succumbs to the dreaded writer’s block. I watch Californication for more or less the same reason as everybody else: the sex, drugs, and occasional rock-and-roll. And as a writer of fiction, I’m also a sucker for any TV show or film about writers and writing. When I first heard about Californication from a friend, I was excited, especially since the original programming on premium cable tends to be a cut above the rest. I imagined of this grand union between pop culture and contemporary literature, a TV show to reach out to the lapsed reader. But despite all the funny repartee and sex-fueled high jinks, it wasn’t what I was hoping for.
At the start of the decade a wave of coming-of-age TV dramas brought scads of independent music to a mainstream audience. Even today, a ten-second sound clip on Gossip Girls or Grey’s Anatomy is enough to jetpack an unknown artist to the top of iTunes. Why can’t a show like Californication do the same for literature? By my count, Chuck Palahniuk is the only living writer mentioned on the show (once, and not by Hank), over its two seasons, twenty-four total episodes. And Chuck Palahniuk is a perennial bestseller. I have been keeping a loose tally of writers mentioned by Hank on the show, either directly or indirectly. Among others (one or two are probably missing), we’ve got Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Kerouac, and Hemingway – so, basically, the course load for an eleventh grade English class. I’m in full acknowledgment of the tremendous talents of the writers mentioned above, and the last thing I want is to knock their work or downplay the scope of their influence, but when those are the only writers being referenced, on a show about a contemporary novelist no less, it propagates the idea that the only writers worth reading are dead, and that the best literature is behind us.
Books don’t have the luxury of air-land-and-sea advertising campaigns – flyers in the Sunday morning supplement, billboards over Times Square, late-night infomercials or Superbowl spots between the Geico Cavemen and the GoDaddy bikini models. Contemporary literature’s only mousehole into the public consciousness is through other modes of entertainment: book-to-film adaptations, Oprah’s book club, and, yes, television shows like Californication. Of course, the show isn’t responsible for promoting contemporary literature. It is, however, responsible for providing an air of realism, as it is meant to be a “realistic” show.
Consider shows and films featuring connoisseurs of other forms of art – High Fidelity is a good example, based on the Nick Hornsby novel of the same name. What if the only bands Rob Gordon (in the book, Rob Fleming) listened to were The Beatles and The Rolling Stones? The film wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting (and neither would the book). Instead, all kinds of cool underground artists were plugged: John Wesley Harding (a writer, himself), Royal Trux, Smog, The Beta Band, and so on and so forth. Of the contemporary writers I know, most read predominantly contemporary literature. Not that they don’t read the classics, I’m just saying that the classics aren’t the only thing they read.
This month, in support of the upcoming season, Simon Spotlight Entertainment released God Hates Us All, a fictitious novel by the fictitious Hank Moody (no ghostwriting credit on the copyright page). A strange marketing strategy. It’s hard to imagine this book will find much of a readership beyond hardcore fans. And besides, why would they would want to promote their show through a medium they so willfully neglect to promote on the show?
Entourage features cameos from contemporary actors, deposits the name of a celebrity or film in nearly every line of dialogue. And it works too. It gives the show an authentic feel. Working actors, I assume, do talk about recent films, their colleagues and competition. Shouldn’t contemporary writers figure into a show about a contemporary writer? I want to see Hank Moody get into a fight at a Sam Lipsyte reading, reconnect with his estranged brother Rick, go out to lunch with Barry Hannah or Denis Johnson … and then get in a fight with someone at the next table. I want to see characters reading books by Mary Robison and Amy Hempel and Haruki Murakami and Chris Adrian. Artistically, literature is thriving in a big way. There is a surplus of extraordinary writing out there, coming from both large and small presses, print and online sources. Californication has an opportunity that would serve the interests of both parties, add a new dimension to the show, but instead it settles for another half-baked portrait of a writer. Why not give it a try? If it doesn’t work, Hank can go back to reading Flaubert. Hundreds of new titles drop each month; I’m sure there is at least one book Hank would like.
