TV's Call Girl

By James Poniewozik

After New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was busted as Client No. 9 of the Emperors Club prostitution ring, the first and simplest question pundits asked was, Why do powerful men do this? (New York magazine succinctly answered with a picture of Spitzer, the label brain and an arrow pointing to his crotch.) Next came, Why do their wives stand by them?, for which many thinkers offered many theories.

An even more interesting question, yet one less scrutinized in the news coverage, was, What kind of women get into this business and why? Luckily, pay cable was made to answer such puzzlers. hbo is adapting the novel Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl into a series by Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City. But Showtime is first into the sack, with the British comedy Secret Diary of a Call Girl (Mondays, 10:30 p.m. E.T.), which asks, What's a nice young girl like you doing in an oldest profession like this?

"The first thing you should know about me," says the title character (Billie Piper), "is that I'm a whore." Her name is the second thing--and the third: she's "Belle" to her clients, "Hannah" (her real name) off the job. (The series is based on a blog by pseudonymous London escort Belle de Jour, named for the Catherine Deneuve movie.) Finally, she offers her motivations: "I love sex," she says. "I love money."

Novels, movies and TV--not to mention reality--have trained us to expect the other shoe to drop: the childhood abuse, the secret self-loathing, the I've-been-to-paradise-but-I've-never-been-to-me regret. It never does. Oh, Belle/Hannah's life is more complicated than she first lets on. She hides her work from her family and her best friend/ex-boyfriend Ben (Iddo Goldberg). She has vague literary ambitions and is aware that hers is a job without a long future. And despite the high-class, clean-and-safe veneer, she has to call her agency on each date with a code phrase--"No problemo"--to confirm her client isn't Jack the Ripper.

But she feels no shame that she has sex for a living; nor does Showtime, whose Call Girl ads have a retro-glam shot of Piper reclining in a martini glass. An Amy Winehouse theme song adds to the gritty-chic vibe. In a way that is sure to offend liberal feminists and conservative moralists alike, Call Girl is glamorous yet not glamorized. Belle has expensive clothes and a fab flat, but she doesn't have a fantasy life--just a well-paying job embodying men's fantasies.

Posh as it is, Call Girl at its best is not really a sexy show. There's something studied and businesslike about Belle's bed play, and her sessions with pasty-buttocked businessmen are usually more funny than arousing. It's not a profound show either, though Hannah occasionally ruminates on her sex-vs.-love life `a la Carrie Bradshaw in satc: "Sex is really a numbers game. Group sex is complicated, but that's mechanics. For me the hardest numbers have always been one plus one." (One is the loneliest but by no means the highest number that she'll ever do.)

No, Call Girl is most fascinating simply as a story about work. In TV comedies, the nuts-and-bolts details of jobs tend to fade into the background. In Call Girl, you learn that prostitution at Belle's level comes with the same demands and annoyances as any other career catering to the high-maintenance wealthy. The show is, in a way, not about sex but about making it (so to speak) in the service economy.

Thus we learn that, like a chef or a spa owner, she has to deal with bad reviews (on a website for sex connoisseurs). Her friends tend to be other service pros: bar managers, boutique clerks, concierges. She earns -L-105,000 (more than $200,000) a year, pays 40% to a snooty female "agent" and exchanges, ahem, services with her tax preparer. (She writes him a check and he gives her cash back, so that she can get a receipt and write off the tax-prep fee.)

Hannah's normalcy is refreshing, and it keeps the show light and funny. But it also makes her seem a little dull and shallow. The story strives so hard to make her unconflicted that she lacks the conflict a protagonist needs. Call Girl didn't need to make her a cautionary tale, but it might have benefited from a broader scope that told us more about her fellow escorts--those who don't, say, blithely name-drop Luis Bunuel flicks. In the Spitzer case, reporters eventually tracked down his regular date, "Kristen," an aspiring singer with a MySpace page. The drab details we glimpsed--would-be American Idol ends up with a bit part in Fallen Idol--contrasted ironically with the club's play-pretend trappings of emperors and diamonds (the basis for its pricing scale).

It would have been interesting to see what Call Girl would have made of a character like this. As it is, it's just a tale of one woman, which doesn't pretend to tell us anything universal about the world's oldest profession. Except, perhaps, what TV shows like Top Chef have been telling us for a while now: that the customer-service business is hard work.