The last episode of Californication I reviewed was number four. I’m now up to six, but I won’t be attempting to bring the reviews up to date, because to be quite honest, my interest has started to wane. The initial promise of the first two episodes seems to have been a little empty, and what looked to be a – dare I say it – edgy, new comedy drama has quickly become a sickly sweet soap opera.

It’s not that I’ve lost interest completely, but I certainly don’t regard it as must-watch TV. David Duchovny, as always, manages to keep things afloat, and I’ll still be tuning in each week to see how he’s doing. But I don’t feel there’s anything I can say about this show without just recounting the plot of each episode (and Wikipedia does a good enough job of that already).

There’s also a risk that if I miss an episode, I’m no longer going to feel compelled to find a way to catch up, and in the end, I’ll stop watching completely. If I really think about it, apart from the promise of gratuitous nudity, the main reason I started watching Californication in the first place was to get another dose of Duchovny. However, I’d much rather see him making movies than TV. That said, if he could get a more weighty project, similar to the Sopranos, 24, or The West Wing, I’d consider it more worthy of his abilities.

So as Californication settles into comfortable mediocrity, this series of reviews is waving farewell for now, rather than falling into a similar pattern. Perhaps if some major event happens in the series, like an alien invasion or an outbreak of vampirism, there might be reason to resurrect these reviews. However, that is, at best, unlikely. Sorry, Hank.