Stuck in the Middle
It's not T&A, it's HBO. But not the HBO of water-cooler favorites like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Entourage. Or even the HBO of intriguing flops (Carnivale, John in Cincinnati, Unscripted) and underappreciated masterpieces (The Wire).
You can't get 40 million to pay $120 a year for content they can get for free on dozens of other channels, so HBO has always sold nudity, sexual situations, strong language, and violence. Sometimes they combine all these things with drama (i.e., Oz) or drama and comedy (The Sopranos), and sometimes they just focus on the nudity and sexual situations.
Shows like Real Sex, G-String Divas, Cathouse, and its HBO's latest offering, Katie on Demand offer a brand of T&A best described as middlecore. Middlecore is more explicit than what you'll find in the softcore movies that play on Cinemax, with occasional flashes of labia and flaccid penises, and lots of candid, anatomically precise talk about every fetish you can imagine.
Like non-fiction paperbacks from the 1940s and 1950s that packaged raunch in the sanitizing robes of sociology, art criticism, and journalism, middlecore always includes the pretense of meta-commentary. It's not porn, it's about porn. It maintains an ironic distance, because it knows that hardcore porn, with its crummy production values, goofy O-faces, and overwrought dirty talk is pretty ridiculous -- and only moreso when when viewed in the context of a cool, serene, impeccably furnished urban loft. Middlecore gives the upscale, educated, tasteful audience it targets a way to get their nasty, explicit fix of porn in a package that's culturally congruent with their lifestyle.
And Katie Morgan, a 27-year-old veteran of over 200 hardcore videos, is the new queen of middlecore. With her cascading blonde hair, silicone-enhanced breasts and goofy grin, Morgan simultaneously evokes Jenna Jameson and Teri Garr, a nice, intelligent, quirky girl next door who loves having threesomes on camera.
She's candid but not gross, she's articulate and funny without ever being so incisive or acerbic that her intellect trumps her physicality, and apparently she doesn't own any clothes at all. In Katie On Demand, her new series of six-minute shorts that run on HBO's section of Comcast's OnDemand service, she's naked virtually the entire time.
Each episode follows the same basic formula. First, Katie introduces that episode's theme while standing naked on an empty stage in front of a red curtain. Themes include things like "The pros and cons of having sex on staircases and bannisters," and are illustrated using clips from vintage porn, Katie's own ouvre, and various other sources. After a couple minutes of that, Katie sist naked in a director's chair and answer questions related to that show's theme. ("Have you ever had sex on a staircase or a bannister?") After a couple minutes of that, Katie dances in front of a stripper pole. In these segments, a wardrobe consultant is finally necessary, but don't worry -- they don't ever use any outfits that cover her breasts or her butt.
And that's pretty it. HBO hasn't given up on expensive, ambitious, complicated programming. January will bring a new season of The Wire, along with In Treatment, a five-nights-a-week half-hour drama starring Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist. But the network obviously sees where entertainment is headed in the post-YouTube world. We may be too busy for appointment programming, and too distracted to follow shows with dozens of plotlines. But six minutes of middlecore, as our schedules permit? Sure, we've got time for that.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]