Tell Me You Love Me

Sunday, 22 June 2008 in General
Tags: HBO, love, relationships, television, Tell Me You Love Me, TMYLM, tv

I’m just a little bit after the halfway point in watching HBO’s newest series, Tell Me You Love Me, and i’m really liking it. I think it’s important to point out the difference in between liking and enjoying, as there are definitely times where the show was difficult in watching, but nonetheless the endresults are just as affirming.

The show evolves around three couples who are all in the process of a relationship therapist, and the difficulties the they all face in their relationships. There’s a definite plot line, but instead of focusing on that the show insists on detailing the three relationships: Carolyn and Palek, a young successful couple who’s struggling to be pregnant, Jamie and Hugo, an engaged couple with monagamous issues as well as a history of infidelity past, and Katie and David, who is by far my favourite couple, who are having trouble rekindling their sex lives after years of marriage and with two children constantly in the household.

(Katie & Dave, my favourite couple in the series, Image via NJ.com)

Tell Me You Love Me is inevitably about these relationships, and it focuses meticulously around that topic. The show has a very intimate, if not claustrophobic, feel to it, and part of it is from the lack of a soundtrack but moreso the controversial amount of uncensored and realistic sexual contents on each episode.

But the show isn’t pornographic by any means. As Wong-Kar-Wai had stated in making the movie 2046, that it is a difficult and precise task to capture the sense of emotions and eroticism without being pornographic. And this shows reflect that. These raw scenes catapult you into their innermost and honest lives and I can’t see the show showcasing the same intimacy level of these couples without it. It absolutely defines a groundbreaking way to successful storytelling.

(Jamie & Hugo, in a raw, yet heartbreaking, sex scene in Tell Me You Love Me, Image via NYtimes.com)

There are times when the show becomes difficult to watch, as if you’re witnessing the bad part of the relationship with no way out. The faults are usually not due to their jobs or other external factors, but from basic human misunderstanding to difference perspectives, and it’s difficult to watch because these characters are so translatable and transparent to real life. They make the very same mistakes we make.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the characters develop, and perhaps at the same time i hope to learn a bit more about myself, if not about love itself.