BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The executive producers of HBO's "Tell Me You Love Me" are either incredibly naive or incredibly disingenuous. Maybe both.
Their new series about several couples in various stages of couples therapy is the most overtly sexual on TV. Without getting too specific, there are scenes in the pilot that go beyond anything on TV — even the smutty movies that air late at night on some of those pay-cable channels.
"Tell Me You Love Me," which premieres Sept. 9, is already being called "the porn show."
And yet creator/executive producer Cynthia Mort sat in front of a room full of TV critics and feigned ignorance of any of this. "It's certainly turning out to get a lot more attention than I thought it would," she said.
Oh, puh-leeze.
One of the show's stars, Michelle Borth, obviously felt the need to draw a distinction — "We are not porn stars. We're actors."
Then producers tried to brush off questions about whether the sex acts are real or simulated.
"I'm not sure, and I don't think you need to get into it," executive producer Gavin Polone said.
What? He's "not sure" whether the sex is real? He doesn't want to "get into it"?
We were told that the sex scenes are not gratuitous and that they're integral to the storylines. This devolved into a debate about whether "Tell Me You Love Me," to use a Hollywood-ism, "pushes the envelope" in terms of its sexual content. (And it's absolutely clear that it does.)
"The decision we made wasn't to push the envelope but was to be honest about the language of intimacy," said HBO Entertainment President Carolyn Strauss.
Uh-huh. It's all about honesty.
And Mort insisted she had no intentions of doing any envelope pushing, which could only mean that she's never actually watched TV.
I don't disagree with the prepared response offered in defense of the sexual content on an HBO show.
"It's HBO. It's a little bit different," said cast member Ally Walker. "You pay to have this in your home."
"You have to make a discrete decision to subscribe to the network," said HBO co-president Richard Plepler. "So in that regard if people ... don't want it in their home, they don't have to have it in their home."
But to insist that the explicit sex scenes weren't designed to draw viewers is, well, impossible to believe.
"To look at 'Tell Me' and think that the first take-away is that it's pornographic, to me, misses the essential truth of the film," Plepler said.
There's going to be a lot of missing going on.
If we accept Mort's assertion that she's truly surprised that her show's content has engendered no small degree of controversy, then the only alternative is that she is incredibly naive. And Mort doesn't seem to be naive.
Mort explained the graphic nature of the content by saying, "These are sex scenes between two people who are in love in a committed long-term relationship. It's not marginalized, it's not perverted. ... So I am a bit surprised, but it's OK."
That doesn't explain the footage of, um, various characters', um, anatomy.
And refusing to answer the question about exactly how real the sex scenes are was, well, stupid. That was true after the news conference when Mort continued to dodge, weave and evade.
"I actually don't want to get into any specifics about it," she said. "It's private. It's between the actors."
What? You're not making a home movie, you're making a TV show! It's NOT just between the actors; it's between the actors and the audience.
"Why do we need to answer that question?" Mort told a couple of colleagues and me.
"Because if you don't answer it, it remains the question," I replied. "People are going to focus on this and not focus on your show. You talk about honesty, and yet this seems a rather straightforward question that we can't get an answer to."
She hemmed and hawed a bit, then — rather obliquely and yet more specifically than can be printed in a family newspaper — finally said that the sex scenes don't contain real sex.
Was that REALLY so difficult?
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com