When Characters Talk About Sex, Do Women Have More Fun?

One of the first publicity hiccups for Mike Binder’s HBO series “The Mind of the Married Man” occurred last summer, in a ballroom at the Pasadena Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

The nation’s television critics and reporters were on hand for the semiannual unveiling of new TV shows on the cable and broadcast networks. HBO had put together a moving hour on “Band of Brothers,” the pay channel’s 10-part World War II epic based on the book by Stephen Ambrose. Via satellite, Ambrose discussed how the men of Easy Company helped save the world from fascism; onstage, Carwood Lipton, one of Easy Company’s surviving members, bore witness to the enduring dignity of America’s war veterans.

When Binder came onstage to discuss his little show about a married man who struggles with the impulse to have sex with other women, half the ballroom emptied out, as reporters followed Lipton into the lobby.

At HBO, whose economics are based on subscribers, not advertisers, success is very much about manipulating the press to receive each new piece of programming as noteworthy and special--a gift from the TV gods. In the absence of a ratings imperative, shows are expected to resonate commercially and culturally (“Band of Brothers,” “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos”) or display the kind of rules-busting bravado that puts critics into blurb overdrive (“Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”).

“The Mind of the Married Man” has done neither, and Binder now finds himself wondering if his show, whose first season ends Sunday night at 10:30, will live to see another.

In the series, Binder stars as Micky Barnes, a Chicago newspaper columnist. Micky has a lovely wife at home (Sonya Walger), an alluring assistant at work (Ivana Milicevic) and a sexual appetite that doesn’t know where to be. In an early episode, Micky’s wife catches him with a stash of downloaded pornography on his computer. A later episode has Micky caught masturbating after getting worked up by his assistant and her roommate. Sometimes, Micky chooses the relative anonymity of a visit to a massage parlor. Women haunt him as fantasy conquests who appear at the foot of his bed while his wife sleeps.

Providing sideline commentary to Micky’s escapades are two colleagues who emerge as the yin and yang of marital fidelity--the sensitive, monogamous Doug (Taylor Nichols) and the philandering Jake (Jake Weber). Often, they gather at a neighborhood bar with two other friends--a cocktail of characters and conversation that makes “The Mind of the Married Man” a creative cousin to “Sex and the City.”

Neither critics nor viewers, however, have warmed to the association, perhaps, in part, because the characters on “Sex and the City” came to life as single women, not married men. Regardless, preliminary results from HBO’s unofficial sociology experiment would seem to suggest the following: Women talking about sex--empowering and titillating. Men talking about sex--shallow and depressing and morally repulsive.

“If this was a show about married women who thought about hunky guys all the time, and a couple of them had affairs, [and] a couple of them were getting close to having affairs, the press and critics would be all over it as freeing and empowering and bold,” Binder says. “But the fact that it’s about men, it’s just dirty and sleazy and immediately relegated to frat-house comedy.”

Binder has other analogies. Take “The Bridges of Madison County” and flip the equation. Make it about a husband who has sex with a gorgeous photographer while his wife is away. “You’d be run out of town,” he says.

Having ordered the first 10 episodes after reading the pilot, HBO has committed to 13 more scripts of “Mind of the Married Man” but not to the production of them. Chris Albrecht, HBO’s president of original programming, says the network will weigh the cost of doing another season against the potential of new pilots under consideration.

Of equal concern to Albrecht and HBO is how the show might rekindle good press. So far, there is mostly the sting of negative association. “‘Married Man’ wants to copy ‘Sex and the City,’ but it isn’t nearly as deft or surprising, although it is certainly a cultural barometer of sorts,” wrote New York Times critic Julie Salamon. “That men have goatish tendencies is hardly news, although recently it has been the news.”

For HBO, which looks to the middle-and highbrow media culture for validation, being told that a show is not on the cutting edge of anything does not recommend its renewal.

“We have to figure out a way to introduce a wider audience to the show and a way to get the media constituency to give the show a second look,” Albrecht says, adding that the show was reviewed “based on social politics.”

It should be said that “Sex and the City” takes a frothier, more escapist approach to its subject, whereas Binder is going for a more reality-based tone. Binder says the show erred initially by presenting itself as a sex-obsessed comedy, which discouraged audience involvement with its characters and enabled critics to blast it as prurient.

Indeed, as the show has matured, episodes have spent more time exploring the effect Micky’s obsessions have on his marriage, the little lies that become necessary to cover the acting out. In the process, the show’s comedy has become more organic than announced. Given a second season, Binder says, he wants to continue in this vein.

Albrecht concedes Binder has taken the show away from the lighter sex comedy initially envisioned.

“We had talked to him a lot about ... [letting] people get used to the characters, let everyone percolate,” he said. “Mike became very caught up in the journey for these characters, and he told an enormous amount of story for a half-hour show in a first season.”

Still, from a cultural standpoint, Binder is working at a disadvantage, tackling subject matter that doesn’t make audiences feel sophisticated in the way a show about the Mafia or the funeral business does.

To draw a generous analogy, Binder faces the sort of backlash experienced in contemporary literature by such lionized writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, both of whose genius has long been attenuated by accusations of misogyny. And while television tends to blush in the face of “boorish” sexual behavior by men, either condemning it or joking it away, fiction has long been a home to explore it.

Consider Matthew Klam, 37 years old, named by the New Yorker magazine as one of the 20 best writers in the country under 40. Recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and the O.Henry Award.

So what does Klam write about in his acclaimed debut collection of short stories, “Sam the Cat?”

“Horniness and sex,” he says.

This includes one character who has a misbegotten sexual encounter before leaving for his European wedding and another who lusts after his brother’s wife. Klam has seen “The Mind of the Married Man” twice, and he thinks Binder is tackling a subject that’s “easier to marginalize” than something as upstanding, say, as “The West Wing.”

“Every single guy I know--and I’m talking about people who have good, functioning marriages--have all kinds of predilections for other women that they can’t do anything about,” he says.

For Klam, who is married and lives in Washington, D.C., coping includes conversing weekly with a friend, a professor at George Washington University, about “the greatest hits” of their love lives. Another male friend sends Klam e-mail excerpts, this “pure filth from some woman he works with.”

This should hearten Binder, who has been fending off the criticism that men don’t speak as frankly about sex to one another as his characters do. “I think it depends who your friends are,” Binder says. There’s another criticism: that Micky’s wife Donna is too sexually alluring for Micky’s wanton lust to be believable.

Binder, however, maintains that was a conscious decision. “If I had put a dumpy or a bland or just really average woman in that role, then you’d go, ‘His problem is his wife isn’t good-looking enough,”’ Binder says. “The fact is, by having a woman that beautiful in the role, you realize the problem is not her and her looks.... He’s not lusting after women better-lookin’ than his wife. He’s just lusting after women.”

In its eight Sunday night airings (first at 10 after “Band of Brothers,” and then at 10:30), “The Mind of the Married Man” drew an average 2.3 million viewers. That puts “Mind” on a par with Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “The Larry Sanders Show,” cult hits that helped brand HBO’s slick image.

According to Albrecht, HBO’s limited research has shown that “The Mind of the Married Man’s” popularity is confined to men, including married men who don’t watch the show with their wives.

Maybe they should. Binder, who is married with two children, feels his show is “an odd Rorschach test about how men feel about sexuality and how people feel about relationships.” This isn’t a test, he says, that a lot of married men are eager to take.

“I think a lot of married guys have these issues,” he says, “and they just shut that side of themselves down.”

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“The Mind of the Married Man” airs Sunday night at 10:30 on HBO.