https://www.city-journal.org/hbo-sex-diaries-is-a-cynical-misfire
The emergence of the visionary and provocative television of the 1990s and 2000s, the period that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show, owed a great deal to HBO, whose narrowcast distribution model and welcome appetite for risk helped make such programming possible. More recently, the premium network has found distinction with Show Me A Hero, True Detective, and Chernobyl. Sex Diaries, however, HBO’s new series of 30-minute documentaries about the sex lives of Brooklyn hipsters on the make, is a much more cynical enterprise.
Sex Diaries is derived from a popular New York magazine column of the same name, which ran from 2007 to 2013. Anonymous New Yorkers wrote in to describe their sexual activity (or lack of same) in a given week; columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former NYU Law student and the editor of sex-themed anthologies like Big Book of Orgasms, Vol. 2 and Crowded House: Threesome and Group Sex Erotica, curated and edited the submissions. Kramer Bussel aimed to capture a representative sample of New Yorkers, both gay and straight, from the very sexually active to the more solitary, from vanilla to kink. Inevitably, the television series leans more heavily into less mainstream lifestyles, from polyamory to latex fetishism to trans sex. What provided a frisson a mere decade ago now seems tame, even banal.
The show is bad—extraordinarily bad, in fact, both hollow in conception and, unusually for HBO, badly made—but there is always plenty of bad television to go around. What irks is that HBO is trying to pass off this trash as avant garde. Is it brave and provocative in 2023 to show people engaging in threesomes or in leather bondage, or using Tindr or Grindr to find the assignations that will briefly shore up their sense of self? At the leading edge of opinion in a large U.S. city, the really brave thing would be to suggest that we should impose some limits on our desires. Who besides church leaders is willing to come out in favor of sexual continence and fidelity to a partner? Who would dare to suggest that someone who has sex with many nameless partners is putting their soul at risk? Most of us would much rather be derided as libertines than risk looking like a square.
The series’ first subject, “James,” a British-born female bartender, is rarely clothed, and she looks exceptionally good naked. This was a promising start. And yet, by the episode’s seventh minute—I made a note—I was losing interest, because there’s simply nothing else going on. The producers have no interest in letting us know who James is, aside from her being an exhibitionist.
Episode three gives us a very overweight black woman living in Coney Island. She’s engaged in polyamorous relationships with people she meets out of town. She acknowledges that sex is more fraught for her because of her race and her body size. Something interesting is beginning here—she is trying to tell us something about her inner life—and then the camera just moves on.
