The XXX Files

By James Poniewozik Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003
    • FOX

    SKIN TIGHT: Jewel (Olivia Wilde) is a porn king's daughter, Adam (D.J. Corona) the D.A.'s son

    Never mind that Skin (FOX, Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is the first network series about a porn czar, that it involves a steamy teen romance and that its title is, well, Skin . According to creator Jim Leonard, the drama — the story of a Los Angeles district attorney's crusade to take down an adult-film mogul and their kids' star-crossed love — is not about sex. It's about politics, anxiety and money.

    Tomato, to-mah-to. On Skin , politics, anxiety and money are the very definition of 21st century American sex, in which desire and guilt dance their eternal lambada to the frantic beat of the electro-media. In Skin's world, come-ons for sex chat compete for TV time with pictures of abducted girls on Amber Alerts. In Skin's world, D.A. Thomas Roam (Kevin Anderson) runs his re-election campaign on an antismut crusade, while his target, Larry Goldman (Ron Silver), quips, "If the voters are so much against porn, why do I live in a 52,000-sq.-ft. mansion?" (And both men are powerless to control the hormones of their children, who meet and fall in love.) In Skin's world, a generation that grew up taking sexual liberties is rearing kids and now wants to take those liberties back, please.

    The idea, says Leonard, had two inspirations: his daily routine of deleting unwanted porn e-mails from his teenage sons' computer and his overhearing two mothers at his gym discussing whether to let their 13-year-old daughters get their navels pierced. "Their conversation," he says, "was really about the same issue, the sexualization of children and youth culture." (Raising that subject on the network that gives us The O.C. and Paradise Hotel is either denial or genius.)

    Is America ready to make a pornographer into the next Tony Soprano? Leonard and his stars say yes, on the grounds that porn is more "mainstream" than ever. It's accessible on computers, in hotel rooms, on cable; dirty movies are a punch line on Friends ; Pamela Anderson voices a pole dancer on Spike TV's cartoon Stripperella ; porn chic is embraced by pop stars from Blink 182 to Kid Rock to Madonna.


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    Of course, if porn were truly mainstream, it would cease to be dirty and thus cease to be porn. (Would you be reading this article if Skin were set in the aluminum industry?) But porn is definitely Big Business — estimated at $10 billion a year — and as Skin emphasizes, much of that goes into the coffers of blue-chip hotel chains, media companies and cable operators (such as Time Warner, the parent company of TIME ). In the pilot, Goldman's company negotiates a partnership with DirecTV — the satellite service that, in real life, Fox's parent company, News Corp., has struck a deal to control. "Certainly," says Leonard dryly, "[Fox] asked us to change the name of the company" in the version that will air.

    That reference was probably more controversial than anything you will see on Skin ; it's really no more risque than several new fall shows — NBC's Coupling and Las Vegas , say — and less so than basic-cable fare like FX's Nip/Tuck . If anything, it may whitewash porn by showing only its most telegenic, soft-core side. The big risk Skin takes is with Goldman, who makes a surprisingly appealing flesh peddler. You could mistake him for the respectable entertainment mogul that he believes he is. Like Satan in Paradise Lost , he's the devil who gets all the best lines — he's wry and perceptive, with a bloodhound's nose for other people's hypocrisies, if not his own.

    To prepare for the role, Silver met with Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and went to porn sets (strictly in the interest of craft!) to chat up starlets. "They have a term for everything," he marvels. "They're talking about D.P.s, and I'm nodding knowingly. It turns out that it means 'double penetration.'" Silver says he considers Goldman a "compartmentalizer." "Nobody wants to think of themselves as a bad person," he says. "He has elaborate rationalizations."

    What works best about Skin is that it doesn't let you accept or reject those rationalizations easily. This is a smart show with a lot of visual pop, and the Roam-Goldman, ego-id dichotomy is especially intriguing. (Roam represents how America votes at the ballot box; Goldman, how we vote with our wallets.) But the first two episodes are too dour and somber, especially when Silver is not onscreen. Perhaps because the producers want to avoid glamorizing porn with too light a tone, Skin is so high-mindedly determined to depict porn as a scourge or a big-money business that it forgets that porn would not exist if it wasn't also, for someone, pleasurable. Skin does an admirable job of showing us the politics, the culture, the angst of sex. Would the sexiness of sex be too much to ask for?