Dirty Sexy Money cures Recession Blues
TELEVISION: Dirty Sexy Money (E4)
OUR appetite for current affairs and hard news is only matched these days by our appetite for complete trash. As in the world of fashion, it is the very high end and the very low end that are surviving.
You can keep your ITV costume dramas with their characters and pathos and subtlety, we want escapist crap featuring unbelievable characters we don't care about. This is nothing new. Someone told me the other day she remembers the hot conversational topic on the big PAYE marches in 1979 and 1980 was generally Dallas.
Dirty Sexy Money is the new Dallas. There's a very rich family, each of the characters is no more than the most hastily drawn caricature, there is a Sue Ellen-style slutty lush character and a white-haired patriarch. Taking even the level of acting alone, it is extraordinary this show survived to a second series but yet it is compulsive viewing. Allow me attempt to fill you in. Bear in mind that everything we are about to go through happened in just one episode. The action moves so quickly on Dirty Sexy Money that it could possibly take longer than an hour to relate everything that happened in the 45 minutes that is the TV hour.
Tripp Darling, played with high ham by Donald Sutherland, is the father of the dynasty. He seems to have killed his wife's long-standing lover (Tripp's wife Letitia was accused of it but the trial collapsed -- we'll come back to that) Tripp's son Patrick, or Patty has become a senator, but in the process his transsexual lover, encouraged by the family, has disappeared and that is really all that matters to Patty. Then Carmelita the transsexual reappears and comes to see Patty because Patty's dead wife's brother approached him/her/it (Carmelita) to say he (the dead wife's brother) knew that Patty was responsible for killing his own wife. In fact, we know that's not true. Patty's wife was basically trying to kill Patty, over the Carmelita issue among other things, and she slipped and died. In fairness though, Patty did cover it up because it looked bad.
Tripp has now gone into partnership with his former arch enemy Simon Elder who was briefly married to his daughter (Karen -- the Sue Ellen person) but that was all a set up for him to get his hands on the Darlings' fortune or something. Lucy Liu, the former prosecution attorney who prosecuted the case against Tripp's wife re the killing of her lover, is now Patty's chief of staff and she also is secretly working for Simon Elder. She also had an affair with Tripp's young son while the trial of Tripp's wife was going on, but it turns out the mother got the son to do that as it led to the collapse of the trial. But now the son is working for Lucy Liu in Patty's senatorial office and they still have feelings for each other though she is keeping him at arm's length (How does he feel about it? When his mother asks him, he replies "double grande depresso Mom"). By the way, the reason Lucy Liu is working as a spy for Simon Elder is because he seems to have her son in captivity.
Patty is delighted to see Carmelita again and has decided he will announce their love to the world at his senatorial inauguration: "Tomorrow's not just going to be the start of my new term in office, it's going to be the start of a new life for both of us," he tells him/her/it.
Patty's brother Brian is a priest on leave of absence and the mother of his child is dying from cancer. So he makes a deal with God that he will return to the priesthood if she recovers. She duly begins recovering by some miracle so he has to go back to the priesthood where he tells the bishop he wants his job back (He says to God, "OK. You friggin' win"). It also means he can't be with the mother of his child, because he has decided he loves her. But then, being a priest didn't stop him in the past.
Meanwhile, the Darlings have the brother of Patty's ex wife sectioned to keep him quiet until Patty gets inaugurated but he overpowers the guards and escapes and drives the Paddywagon away apparently still in handcuffs.
And that's all just one episode and I haven't even mentioned the main character. Mind you, the show seems to be on loads of channels, all at different points in the Darling family odyssey. For more of this type of rubbish see Brothers and Sisters (Dynasty to Dirty Sexy Money's Dallas). Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives are worth a go too.
Declan Lynch is away
- Brendan O'Connor
