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After previously teasing us with the kind of reconstructed-hip-shattering, hot sexagenarian action we haven't seen on premium cable since we caught a late-night Cinemax presentation of Emanuelle: Retirement Community Seductress back in college, the producers of Tell Me You Love Me threw us an oddly prudish curveball last night, dramatizing nothing more racy than a chef-on-chef sex act probably not graphic enough to be pixelated by a Fox Hell's Kitchen censor, making us feel we'd completely wasted the hour we spent (we didn't even TiVo through all the tiresome yapping) looking for further evidence of ejaculating-prothesis use or glimpses of envelope-pushing penetration. But we did spend some time reading yesterday's NY Times piece about the ongoing pornification of television and film, in which the director of a competing sex-positive pay-TV entertainment offered a dissenting opinion on how graphic the screwing needs to be to achieve fucking-verisimilitude:

Even so, a lot of people in the industry don't buy the idea that some films require actors to engage in the real thing. Scott Winant, a director of the Showtime series "Californication," which also uses sex as a narrative device, said that what makes the scene is the emotions conveyed in the acting, not the act. Real sex, he said, "doesn't necessarily communicate the emotion of the sexual moment. It's more effective to work with great actors who can identify with a sexual moment through the acting."

We're sure that Winant wasn't referring specifically to the Tell Me cast, who altogether seem more than capable of identifying with a sexual moment even with a director interrupting them with notes like, "Hey, Adam, would you mind shifting to the right just a touch? We're really going to lose our sense of the emotional truth of you desperately trying to knock up Sonia if that shadow obscures your balls. Thanks, buddy, now back to the boning, you're really in a groove there"; he was merely demonstrating pride in the performances on his own show, where seasoned vets like Evan Handler prove each week that they don't need to actually show their areolas being yanked off during a nipple-clamp mishap to have the scene resonate with a realism-craving audience.