Californication
カリフォルニケーション ある小説家のモテすぎる日常
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A blocked novelist sleeps his way through Los Angeles while claiming to want his family back.
Hank Moody, a New York novelist who followed his long-term partner, Karen, to Los Angeles, has not written since Hollywood turned his novel God Hates Us All into a sugary romantic comedy. He drinks, sleeps with strangers and wants Karen back, though she is about to marry a publisher, Bill, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Becca, sees all of it. In the first episode he picks up a young woman in a bookshop and sleeps with her, then learns she is Mia, Bill's sixteen-year-old daughter. It is statutory rape, and Mia uses it to blackmail him before stealing his new manuscript and publishing it as her own. On Karen's wedding day, as Hank drives off with Becca, Karen runs out of the reception and jumps into his car.
The reunion does not last. In the second season Hank writes the memoir of a record producer, Lew Ashby, who dies of an accidental overdose, and Karen takes a job in New York while Hank stays in Los Angeles with Becca. His agent and best friend, Charlie Runkle, loses his job, stumbles into the porn business and cheats on his wife, Marcy, who is in treatment for cocaine. In the third season Hank teaches creative writing and sleeps with a student, his teaching assistant and the dean's wife. At its end he confesses to Karen that he slept with Mia when she was sixteen, punches a police officer and is arrested.
In the fourth season his secrets are public. Hank is tried for statutory rape and found guilty, and Karen leaves on a cross-country trip with Becca and a new boyfriend. In the fifth, nearly three years later and near the end of his probation, Hank lives in New York and writes a film for a rapper turned actor; a girlfriend he has left, Carrie, takes her own life and almost takes him with her. The sixth finds him in rehab, where he falls for Faith, a rock muse, and goes on tour with a rock star, but in the end he leaves her to go back to Karen.
In the seventh and final season Hank writes for a television police drama and meets Levon, an adult son he never knew he had, and Levon's mother, Julia. Becca comes home to announce that she is getting married. In the last scene Hank and Karen are on a plane to New York together, and he reads her a letter he has written for her: their time in the sun, it says, has been a thing of beauty.
Starring
David Duchovnyas Hank Moody
A blocked, hard-drinking novelist in Los Angeles who cannot say no to temptation and cannot stop loving Karen.
Hank Moody’s story
Hank has followed Karen and their daughter, Becca, to Los Angeles. A young woman he picks up in a bookshop and sleeps with turns out to be Mia, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Karen's fiancé: statutory rape, which Mia uses to blackmail him before publishing his manuscript as her own. Karen runs off with him on her wedding day but refuses his proposal and moves to New York, leaving him with Becca. Teaching, he sleeps with a student, his assistant and the dean's wife, then confesses about Mia and is convicted. Years on, a girlfriend he has left nearly takes his life with her own; after rehab and a rock tour he returns to Karen. He meets Levon, a grown son he never knew, and on a plane to New York reads Karen the letter he has written her.
Natascha McElhoneas Karen
Hank's long-term partner and the mother of his daughter, an architect who keeps trying to build a life without him.
Karen’s story
Karen is engaged to Bill, a publisher, but sleeps with Hank after his father dies and, on her wedding day, runs from the reception into his car. She turns down his proposal and takes a job in New York, leaving Becca with him. Despite his affairs she plans to move the family east, until, on the eve of the move, he tells her about Mia and is arrested. Unable to help him at his trial, she sets off across the country with Becca and a new boyfriend. She marries Bates, who drinks and leaves her; she joins the intervention that sends Hank to rehab. She thinks of giving up on him, but after a car accident she flies to New York with him and listens to the letter he has written her.
Madeleine Martinas Becca Moody
Hank and Karen's sharp-witted daughter, twelve when the series begins, who grows up watching her parents' chaos.
Evan Handleras Charlie Runkle
Hank's agent and best friend, a hapless schemer whose career and marriage keep collapsing.
Pamela Adlonas Marcy Runkle
Charlie's sharp-tongued wife, later ex-wife and then wife again, who fights her own cocaine habit.
Madeline Zimaas Mia Lewis
Bill's sixteen-year-old daughter, with whom Hank has sex not knowing her age, a crime she turns into blackmail.
Why it matters
Californication sold itself on the fantasy of a man women cannot resist, and much of its pull is the glamour of self-destruction: the drinking, the one-liners, the unmade beds of Los Angeles. One reviewer likened Hank to Charles Bukowski, and the show knew it. But it built its story on something it could not go on treating as a joke. In the first episode Hank sleeps with a sixteen-year-old; three seasons later a court finds him guilty of statutory rape, and one critic wrote that the hero looked different after the verdict. David Duchovny, who won a Golden Globe for the role, has argued that the show's focus on sex overloads the character's true nature, a man who was faithful whenever Karen would have him. The question it leaves is whether devotion to one woman redeems what a man does to everyone else, and its romantic ending answers more gently than some viewers will.