I’m back.
I’ve been really enjoying the new ABC series Dirty Sexy Money. The show, about a fictional Darling family living (or perhaps residing) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have all of the flavor of cardboard flavored with cheese, cinnamon, and good dialogue. It’s as if the writers decided to have animated people speak great lines around a semi-fascinating torrid story about sex, lies, and videotape.
In fact, it’s completely pleasurable watching a group of spoiled characters screw each other into oblivion while the main character, a straight man strawman named Nick George (played by Peter Krause), tries to keep it all together at the price of a $10 million salary. The priest is positively awful and impossibly secular. The twin brother and sister act like lovers working out their petty jealousies and love lives in semi-public. The patriarch, played lovingly by Donald Sutherland, acts like menschy schmuck, bent on compassionate (moral) conservatism.
Underlying everything is a mystery about the untimely death of Nick George’s father that is slowly unraveled, a la Twin Peaks, a series that is almost as comparatively funny, dark, and sinister.