I’m a fan of the Showtime show “Californication”. For those of you unfamiliar with it, David Duchovny plays a down ‘n out writer whose first novel won critical and popular acclaim, so he moved from New York to LA to help flesh it out into a movie, which in no way resembled the book (“God Is Dead”–the movie title? “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” starring TomKat–you know, Tom Cruise and Katie Morgan). He can’t find inspiration for a second novel and so spends all his time sleeping with women who can never achieve the status of the woman he loves, drinking, being cynical, etc.
In one episode, he sleeps with the daughter of his ex-girlfriend’s fiancee. The daughter is 16, but Duchovny’s character doesn’t know this. When she discovers one of his old manuscripts and claims it as her own, she is hailed as the new generation of tell-it-like-it-is writers, even though a handful of people know it’s not her work. But she has Duchovny by the short hairs–he goes public with her plagiarism, she goes public with the statutory rape allegation. Continue reading