The last time the Sundance Channel turned its cameras on Vegas, the result was Sin City Law, a sobering and often heart-wrenching documentary series about the local justice system, filtered through a number of high-profile murder cases. Law came from respected French filmmaker Remy Burkel and mostly eschewed sleaze and glitz to focus on serious, complex stories happening to regular people.
The new Sundance reality series to focus on the Vegas area, Pleasure for Sale (Mondays, 11 p.m.), comes from the producers of Taxicab Confessions and follows the lives of legal prostitutes at the Chicken Ranch in Pahrump, so it’s not nearly as serious or as austere as Sin City Law was. It’s also not timid about giving in to its more prurient instincts and confirming a few stereotypes about Nevada and prostitutes. Despite the occasionally tawdry tendencies, Pleasure is also entertaining and even affecting at times, and a mostly fair look at what goes on in legal brothels.
The six half-hour episodes can be a little unfocused, with a number of subjects showing up only for one or two segments, never to be seen again. But the people whom the producers follow throughout the series, including a working girl in her late 40s considering retirement, a 30-something masochist with a troubled past and a cute, kinky housewife looking to make some extra cash, are generally fascinating and do well to illustrate the complexity and diversity of those who decide to make a living having sex with strangers.
The one presence who towers (literally and figuratively) over the show is the 6-foot-tall Gabby, a forceful and frequently irritating personality who clashes with her fellow working girls, suffers from health problems related to a leaky breast implant and trails drama with her wherever she goes. Gabby is the most like your typical reality-TV attention junkie, and her appearances often drag the show down, taking it away from the less contrived, more emotionally resonant stories of the other participants.
Of course, that emotional resonance is mixed in with plenty of tacky footage of the women getting it on with their clients, or at least the ones who agreed to be filmed. This may be the first reality show to require the same disclaimer that you’d find on actual porn (regarding records kept asserting that all participants are over 18). Though the producers stop short of showing actual penetration, they do feature lots of nudity and some only slightly obscured oral sex.
While these scenes may be gratuitous, they do help illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the women and their clients, and especially the way that many of the older prostitutes, with regular clients they’ve seen for years, function as much as therapists and friends as they do as sex objects. The producers give time to many of the clients to explain their motivations for visiting the brothel, and most come off as kind, lonely souls who have no other avenue to fulfill their needs.
Less successful is the attempt to place the brothel in a larger social context, with some predictably outraged local preachers and sanguine old-time townies offering up clichés on both sides. The dark side of the profession is occasionally brought up but never fully explored, so while the show is not the hard-hitting investigation it could have been, it’s still extremely watchable.
Pleasure for Sale *** 1/2