The Girlfriend Experience

I think it’s easily one of the best shows of the year, and a major work by everyone involved, for reasons that I’ll allude to momentarily--though not in detail, because The Girlfriend Experience is actually four or five shows rolled into one, and a big part of its specialness resides in those moments where it morphs from one thing into another.

The performances are extraordinary, in spite of the fact the characters are all very similar--detached from emotion, honesty, sadness, shame and even desire by the airlessness of contemporary life. ... The Girlfriend Experience is one of the best new series of the young year.

There's plenty of plot to contend with, as she tries to balance multiple lives and multiple worlds. But this stark, frank look at a very real thing, that really happens all the time, does tough but oddly beautiful work with exposing this quite real ethos.

This is a singular vision throughout, written and directed by the team of Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz. (She also plays Christine’s older sister.) Their intense focus draws a disquieting portrait of a peculiar personality.

Riley Keough makes an intriguing figure, at once more empowered and more desperate than her cinema alter ego. I have no clue if this is a profound mediation on intimacy or a daylight-noir origin story for Basic Instinct, but I'm hooked. [1/8 Apr 2016, p.101]

The show is provocative, sexually and mentally; it’s alluring and sordid, arousing and disturbing, a unique viewing experience.

This is a haunting, beautiful, indelible nightmare of a series, the kind you’ll find yourself unwilling to wake up from.

A vivid character study, a tense law-firm drama, and an educational deep-dive for any viewer who’d like to learn the ins and outs of what we researchers call “transactional sex.”

The viewer’s feelings toward Christine and her behavior are likely to remain unresolved--but Kerrigan and Seimetz’s refusal to psychologically and morally pin her down is exactly what makes The Girlfriend Experience, in its pungently moody and disturbing way, ultimately difficult to shake off.

The Girlfriend Experience isn’t perfect. Christine’s motivations are sometimes opaque, and sometimes not; the plot is sometimes thrilling, and sometimes not. ... But it is riveting--and sexy--to watch Christine watch the rest of the world.

There's so much thought put into each scene, the composition of each frame, and the camera angles being used that you could mute the show and still come away with a brilliant, emotional story.

There are lots of juicy twists and some melodramatic intrigue, and Kerrigan and Seimetz execute them with nicely chilly precision. But The Girlfriend Experience is at its best when it puts aside plot machinations to deliver a sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of a woman discovering herself.

Keough’s Christine is fascinatingly inscrutable, and the 26-year-old actress (Elvis’s granddaughter, incidentally) carries the series with her chilly poise and enigmatic composure. The show, written and directed by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, offers no exposition whatsoever, rather following Christine from scene to scene and only occasionally abandoning her when plot necessitates it.

The Girlfriend Experience is an intoxicating, provocative, and staggeringly sexy consideration of the illusion of intimacy as compared against whatever real intimacy is, as the title suggests.

Even when it’s boring, it’s absorbing, like an art video playing in the lobby of a boutique hotel.

The Girlfriend Experience” allows for pauses that television (other than “Rectify”) often does not. Sometimes these pauses can be presented in a way that feels too self-aware, but it starts to become a show with its own voice around episode five.

The Girlfriend Experience intuitively grasps the manner in which constantly available information can transform lives. If it resembles any movie genres, it's the paranoid eavesdropping thrillers of the 1970s, like Klute and The Conversation.

Keough's outstanding performance makes the whole thing work, make no mistake. But Kerrigan, Seimetz and Meizler weave a visually evocative backdrop, using only natural light, location-based shooting and a color scheme that allows for the intimacy of the writing to come out and help shape things.

The Girlfriend Experience proves more interesting than engrossing, perhaps because there doesn’t seem to be a single character willing to raise his or her voice above library-corridor volume, connect in any way that’s not ultimately about money or power, or overtly express the possible negative side effects of selling your body for cash.

While fairly well rounded, there are some holes in Christine’s character development. ... First rate production values, an alluring lead and a provocative world makes for intriguing television.

Her initial escapades feel overwhelmingly dour, a byproduct of stilted, emotionless dialogue. Keough plays her role with an almost impenetrable detachment that frustrates at first, but feels necessary in retrospect. ... Things start to get more interesting when Christine learns that one of her wealthy clients has kicked the bucket and left her a large sum of money, setting off alarm bells for the client’s family.

At first, the show feels a trifle frustrating, inasmuch as Christine dives into this strange new world without divulging almost anything about who she is, or wants to be. ... Gradually, though, that becomes its own kind of mystery, and helps foster a pervasive sense of unease, one that makes this Experience feel far more ambitious than something like Showtime’s “The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.”

The Girlfriend Experience, which is so sedate, chilly, and light on incident that it would be unbearable to watch one episode a week (or, in its first weekend, two), with not enough of a hook to pull the viewer back for a new half-hour after a seven day break. Watched in chunks, though, it can be more absorbing, thanks to Riley Keough's lead performance as Christine Reade, a Chicago law student moonlighting as an escort, and thanks to the anthropological tone created by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, who co-write every episode and take turns directing them.

Grim, claustrophobic, and only occasionally riveting.

The characters are so vapid and thinly drawn that they glide like silhouettes through the minimalist stylings of a series crafted without affect.