The Girlfriend Experience 2.1-2: Two for One

Well, The Girlfriend Experience has returned to Starz for its second season, and its very different from the first.

To begin with, each hour contains two separate half-hour stories, with different characters, which so far have no connection to each other.  And no discernible connection to the first season, either.

And the specific storylines are also different in tone and texture from the compelling attorney/call girl (the same person) who was the central character in the first season.  Now we have a political story in the first - maybe, I don't know, like The Good Wife, or its political parts.   And in the second we have a Homeland kind of story, or at least a call girl (actually two) put into some type of high-tech witness protection set-up on an offshore island.

The common thread, of course, is all the call-girls are providing girlfriend experiences, or will provide them, for whatever reason.  And this still makes the stories more interesting than just a call-girl or prostitute story (not that those can't be interesting, too, as demonstrated by The Deuce this year on Showtime).  But the desire for not just sex but a girlfriend for the money makes the men inherently more unusual, ranging from almost verging on decent to sick sadistic bastards.

It's tough to be new or original on television these days, with so much already done, and so much new coming out on every streaming service, as well as cable and the ancient networks.  But Starz is giving us a good run for its (or rather, our) money, and The Girlfriend Experience is part of this, and looks to still be well worth watching.

See also The Girlfriend Experience: Eminently Worth It (my review of Season 1)

 

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